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
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This was a good conversion and help clarify a couple things. For one, I hadn't quite got the point of the sockets. These are so you can mix and match you test pin style without having to resolder the entire pin. Thankfully I only have one style of Test Point so I should be alright with the P100-D2 I'll be using.
Additionally we talked about the state of Open Fixture and it appears the project has several outstanding PRs that need vetting and including (possibly forking?). So if someone out there is itchy to do some FOSS work...... It also appears to not handle internal cutouts but this could be a short coming in the KiCAD Python API.
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