A cheap extension connector for mcHF V06

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With a pair of 2.54 mm in-line male/female connectors and a piece of printed circuit board for prototypes, you can easily made an extension for mcHF V06 boards.



I used a 40-pin connector and carefully cut the remaining 10 pins. In this way you can have an mcHF running at the same time that you can access both sides of each board.

To avoid accidents, when mounting the mcHF, the female connector must be installed on the mchf_rf board. The reason is that this board supplies the supply voltages to the mchf_ui board. A male connector with power supply pins is always a potential risk.





TRIC:

It is possible to take +8 V (track 28), +5 V (track 27) and +3.3 V (track 26) in the connector/extension, as well as the connections to ground to use measuring instruments. You can also proceed in reverse way and apply power to mcHF_ui board by injecting the +5 volts into pin 28 of the connector, in this way you can update the firmware ( I use the bootloader 4.0 of df8oe) without having to connect the mcHF_rf board .

In the photo below: the mcHF_rf board has been removed and the mcHF_ui plate is fed with 5 V. As can be seen, during the initial check it is detected that part of the electronics is missing and warns of the error. However in that way you can do the firs-time bootloader load, update the bootloader, or upgrade the firmware.



The groups of pins on both sides are the ground tracks (pin 1 and pin 30). On track 28 I placed several pins to obtain or inject 5 volts. Track 29 has 8 volts and track 27 has 3.3 volts, controlled by the software.

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