My experience with OpenFixture (chat with @morgan)

Arya wrote 07/12/2019 at 21:54 0 points

<<< - morgan

>>> - me



<<< Hey bud, you've used Open Fixture before right? what acrylic thickness do you recommend?

>>> hey! I don't have any particular recommendations wrt thickness, I used 4mm and was satisfied

>>> I also double-cut the "hinge" parts, they were kinda flimsy for me

>>> as in, I cut one more layer and then overlaid it

>>> let me show you



[...]











>>> I had to edit the blue part a bit so that the second piece could fit









>>> first hinge I made broke, so, afterwards I just added yet another layer to the hinge and superglued the two layers together











>>> this is where it's flimsy
>>> might be good to go with this from the beginning, this is the top half and it holds pogopins - you really don't want to disassemble this half once the pogopins are in place and soldered =)
<<< ok, what else needs to be modified to do this? or does it just make the tap part slightly wider and the bold takes that up?
>>> only the blue part was modified, the hinge part was copied, and its copy was modified a little bit so that it wouldn't have the top&bottom pegs that go inside the square holes on the horizontal layers
>>> the copy is the one that's transparent
>>> also, do make sure that your pogopins fit inside the top half of the jig, inside the small autogenerated holes
>>> might need to edit the holes a little bit, enlarge or shrink. My fit wasn't perfet, but superglue helped.
>>> also, if you have pogopin sockets, this is the perfect place to use them
>>> pogopin tips actually matter here

>>> http://dirtypcbs.com/uploads/store/pogo-pin-tips.jpg









>>> http://dirtypcbs.com/uploads/store/pogo-pin-P100-series-thumb.png









>>> I got the T2 pins









>>> I assembled my jig with these, and it was suffering:











>>> I mostly have through-hole points, and these [pogopins] don't make any kind of good contact with those [points]

>>> so, when I next work on this jig, I will be reassembling it with T2, and, most importantly, pogopin sockets so that in the future I can improve the places where contact is not good

>>> otherwise, you can get stuck while testing and you won't know it's actually your pogopins that are unsuitable, and not the PCB

>>> also, you might need to mod the Openfixture script a little bit, by default it IIRC only exports the SMD testpoints and such, you might want  to also have it export the through-hole parts

>>> IIRC it was a straightforward change, I can send the diff, want it?

<<< sure!

<<< I was just about to start cutting when I realized it used some other rando pads instead of my actually test points

>>> http://paste.ubuntu.com/p/hgchr32gkZ/

>>> here you go

>>> this is output of "git diff", this is not a commit

>>> you should be able to apply it, either way