Desk of Ladyada - Teensy Tester Redesigned to RP2040 Pico
129This week we're looking to redesign our fancy 'tester brains' that we use for many of our microcontroller boards. We have three flavors of testers, the 'drop and beep' simple ones that use an Arduino / Metro as a base and do basic testing of some I2C sensor, the ones that use a Teensy 3.6 to SWD or ISP program a chip and then do a USB enumeration check, and finally the Raspi ones. We've got plenty of metros, and our stash of Raspi 3's is going fine but we've just about run out of Teensy 3.6's! Since we have a lot of microcontroller boards coming soon we wanted to make sure that we could revise this tester to use an RP2040 - it's definitely fast enough and has enough pins, but we needed to have a bitbang USB host implementation in order to test enumeration and/or communicate over CDC/HID/MSD with TinyUSB. Let's look at what we came up with.
The Great Search - SMD USB Type A Host Connector
https://www.digikey.com/short/q5208wrn
As we're redoing one of our testers to work around a part shortage, we're also trying to SMD-ify the whole thing since we use enough of these its worth it for us to make a short run of maybe 50 boards instead of hand soldering. This tester does a USB enumeration check and so we want a USB Type A connector for the USB host. We've always used the classic THM version of the USB Type A, let's see what's available for SMT at Digi-Key!
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