Back in the 90’s I was programming and commissioning building controllers. These controllers would require an eprom to be programmed and inserted into a socket on the PCBs. If there was an update they’d have to be pulled from the PCB, UV’d to erase them, programmed blah blah. A laborious process when a building might have hundreds of these things.
I had an eprom puller to extract them from the PCB socket to avoid bending pins.
Is there an equivalent tool to pull a Pico from a breadboard or far harder, a timer hat?
Hi Mark
There might be but I would not hold my breath. I have somewhere a tool for removing ICs but pulling IC pins out of a socket (even op to 40 or so) is a far cry from pulling the usual header pins out of the female connector due to it’s mechanical size. These pins are usually a pretty tight fit into the female. The first insertion anyway. My personal opinion is most of them are too tight or at best at the maximum allowed size which results in not many insertions before the contact could be suspect.
It is very tempting to lever these out at each end. This can be dangerous as if the board flexes too far the likelihood of cracked tracks and joints becomes a problem. I think each case should be considered in isolation and some suitable method used (gently) to minimise damage. Any sort of special tool would likely require some space around the Pico which would be governed by board design and may probably not be enough to use any tool.
Cheers Bob
require an eprom to be programmed and inserted into a socket on the PCBs. If there was an update they’d have to be pulled from the PCB, UV’d to erase them, programmed blah blah. A laborious process when a building might have hundreds of these things.
A process I remember well. It was very time consuming so I designed an EPROM emulator and sold it on the market for some time.
Emulating is not as easy these days because of the massive amount of features in modern MCUs, but I miss those days so I’m working on something for the Pico right now…well I’m retired, what else am I to do with my time?
