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Add in place programmer's flashing "best practices" and refer to: Tigard > ch341a rev 1.6+ / Raspberry PI/pico for their correctness, cost, kit availability and ease of use.  #120

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@tlaurion

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@tlaurion

Recommended kits, to buy assembed and ready to use can be bought from:

Otherwise you consider yourself advanced enough to properly search, select, assemble and deal with learning by yourself. If so, continue reading.

Otherwise select partner's made available kits for your platform and make sure your SPI chips required voltage (1.8V/3.3V/5v?) and SPI form factor type (DIP/SOIC/WSON?) meets your requirements.


There is a lot of information out there on ch341a programmer giving too much voltage (5v vs 3.3v). Users reports of having bricked their laptops (SPI chip to motherboards resistors).

One of those example is a recent exchange on slack/matrix accessible at:
https://matrix.to/#/!pAlHOfxQNPXOgFGTmo:matrix.org/$kcFoywTcHgKLIbRP3iJ1bgJ8vRUGZsZcCGvvJsCszgw?via=matrix.org&via=nitro.chat&via=talk.puri.sm

xx20/xx30 chips and motherboard resistors are really resilient and cheap ch341a providing 5v never caused any issue, but this may vary for other SPI chips/motherboard when doing in place programming (with a PAMONA clip connected to the chip on the motherboard.)

General guidelines, depending on motherboard is:

  1. Make sure that CMOS, AC Adapter and battery is deconnected.
  2. Make sure to connect the clip on CHIP prior of powering up the programmer (I never followed that even with black programmer and bricked 2 laptops to date because I didn't respect point 1 above.
  3. Other guides suggest to modify ch341 programmer to make sure voltage provided is 3.3v (https://www.chucknemeth.com/laptop/lenovo-x230/flash-lenovo-x230-coreboot being one of them)
  4. Other guides suggest unsoldering/resoldering the SPI for extra caution (never did that)
  5. More expensive programmer (LC Technologies ch341a programmers) were suggested (good general advice)

I would invite people into discussing facts here to be used to create additional flashing best practice page to the wiki.

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