LooUQ's UXplor SWD-F Brings Solder-Free Single Wire Debug (SWD) to Feather Form Factor Boards
Attaching itself to the pads on Adafruit and SparkFun Feather boards with pogo pins, the adapter board makes for quick hardware debugging.
Developers using a Feather-compatible development board have a new option to more easily debug their programs: The LooUQ UXplor SWD-F, an adapter that brings out the Single Wire Debug (SWD) pins ready for use with an external debugger with no soldering required.
"I use Feathers from Adafruit and SparkFun all the time, in fact most of LooUQ's embedded development for the SAMD processors is done on one of these boards," writes LooUQ's Greg Terrell. "I designed the board to make embedded code debugging for LooUQ's applications easier. Instead of use a collection of modified Feather boards in our lab, I can grab any one of them, put it in my project, and start debugging.
"The UXplor SWD-F strikes a balance between being as small as possible and making the 10-pin debugging header accessible. The UXplor SWD-F extends only 7mm beyond the end of your Feather development board from the end opposite the micro-USB connector. For an Adafruit Feather your footprint is 58mm long; the total length of the Thing Plus with the UXplor Feather SWD is 66mm (the Thing Plus extends on the USB end beyond Adafruit units + the 7mm for the UXplor adapter)."
A connection to the SWIO and SWCLK pads on the Feather to be debugged is made using spring-loaded pogo pins, doing away with the need for soldering — and the board itself is entirely passive, with no active components. "But since I was building it," Terrell notes, "I added a Qwiic compatible jack for attaching I2C devices with Qwiic connectors to Adafruit Feathers without a separate board during development."
The UXplor SWD-F is compatible with any Feather board which has the same SWIO/SWCLK pad placement as the Adafruit Feather M0 family, including the Adafruit Feather M4, with a variant available for the SparkFun Thing Plus. For devices with other pads, a JST pigtail is needed. Those who use both Adafruit and SparkFun boards can buy an all-in-one device with the pogo pins in both locations, with the advisory warning that if you forget to insulate one set of pins you can short out a board.
The adapters are now available on the LooUQ Tindie store, priced at $15.
Freelance journalist, technical author, hacker, tinkerer, erstwhile sysadmin. For hire: freelance@halfacree.co.uk.