Buy the CH340G programmer for ESP8266/ESP32 online

When I have designed a custom programmer for ESP based devices like URU Card I’ve made one big mistake. The big board completely covers the schematics and makes testing of the signals hardly possible.

So, I have returned to my last year’s design of the CH340G based programmer and upgraded it with the same pinout as the widely known ESP01 module for the better compatibility and the USB Type C receptacle. Nowadays connectors of this type are way more popular than outdated Micro USB ones.

Comparison of two versions of programmer. New version is black.

Size of the device is only 36x20 millimeters thanks to the more dense components placing and it features circuitry for automatic firmware uploading and the following reset. The assembled device works pretty fine and can upload the firmware with the speeds up to 460800 baud to all ESP8266 and ESP32 devices I have.

Programmer connected to ESP01 module

To connect the programmer to URU Card I have designed a small interconnection board that gives direct access to the contact pads. This design opens access to the pads and components for easy debugging of the device.

Interconnection board for URU Card

Programmer with interconnection board

URU Card with the interconnection board

The board design files are available in the GitHub repository.