Flashing Arduino's Bootloader without ISP header using Pogo Pins

Hi everyone,

I started another hardware where I’m using a BLE112 module, but this time an Arduino core as well. So why should I solder the ISP for flashing the bootloader to the ATmega328 once? I added an FTDI header to the development board as well, so I will be able to program my Arduino clone board using USB.

So I came up with the idea to build something using the Pogo-Pins provided by Adafruit (http://www.adafruit.com/products/394) which looks like this:

I took two small PCBs, a 2×3 ISP header and six of the pogo pins, and soldered those together. No I can attach the Pogo-ISP-Header to an Arduino Clone built by myself and simply flash it after soldering the “Vanilla” ATmega328 to my board. Since there are only the six pins of the ISP which needs to be manually connected, there was no need to build a testing/programming rig for that.  It simply worked and can not program Arduino sketches to my custom board which is based on an Arduino Pro Mini 3.3V/8MHz.

Thanks for reading,

Michael.