Why almost every development department builds its own programming connector

An article by Andreas Bergmann, Managing Director

I have worked as a developer and consultant inside the development departments of small and large companies for more than twenty years. In that time I have seen the same picture everywhere.

The standard connector does not fit the product

A prototype needs a programming interface. The standardised connector exists for exactly that — but it is too large or too expensive for the finished product. So in production it is either left unpopulated, or it stays on the board and makes every single unit more expensive. Either way it costs space.

So people build their own

This is the point at which an in-house solution appears: a self-defined connector, a contact strip, a pin field. Often built by a student assistant, a handful for the department.

What comes out of that works. It is just rarely documented, and mechanically it was never meant to last for years.

And then a year passes

Another department asks for one. A cable breaks and needs replacing. More workstations need equipping. And the person who built them left long ago.

Then the reconstruction begins: what was the pinout again? Which connector was that, and do we now need the plug or the socket? Who trains the new assistant?

If another debugger and a different programming tool arrive in the same period, the game starts over. And production asks for a contact pattern for the test fixture — which would be yet another custom design.

Year after year, the same.

The part nobody calculates

The connectors themselves cost little. What is expensive are the hours: rebuilding, training, hunting for the pinout, waiting when nothing is available. None of that appears in a bill of materials, which is exactly why the sum is rarely noticed.

The detour via a trade fair

Years ago, a small American manufacturer had a stand at a trade fair. On the table were ready-made adapters for the common debuggers and programming tools: usable immediately, re-orderable, built for continuous use — and usable all the way into production without leaving a connector on the board.

Precisely the solution I could have used again and again in the years before.

One problem remained: buying single items from the United States founders on freight and customs handling. For a single cable that is out of all proportion, and the paperwork for goods received wants processing too.

That is why we took on the distribution. Since then the cables come from a catalogue, with an article number, from a German warehouse — re-orderable in two years just as today.

Why us in particular

An adapter rarely breaks when there is time to spare. It breaks when the prototype has to be programmed that is due on the trade fair stand the day after tomorrow — or when the pilot series has to get through production and the date is already fixed.

That is why the decisive question is not the unit price, but how quickly a replacement arrives.

The Tag-Connect range consists of a great many variants differing in pin count, pitch, length and connector at the tool end. For a broad-line distributor, an article number with two sales a year is not worth carrying — for us it is, because for exactly one customer it is the difference between carrying on and waiting.

Our stock is built for that: not large quantities of few part numbers, but breadth.

When not everything is available at once

If the shop shows that an item is not in stock in the quantity you want, that is not the end of the matter here. We get in touch and ask: how urgent is it, and would part of the order help right away?

Often the answer is yes — because that one cable is needed for the prototype due the day after tomorrow, and the other nine are for a project next quarter. Then the one ships today and the rest follow in one to two weeks, because we have the manufacturer supply us by express.

Sometimes we find another way: stock held elsewhere as a buffer, not urgently needed there, can be reassigned after checking. Conversely, we ask you before we touch anything that has been promised to you.

Shipping costs apply per order, not per shipment — an agreed partial delivery within Germany therefore costs you nothing extra. The details are on Shipping and payment.

That is the part of our work a catalogue cannot show: here, someone reads the order.

Andreas Bergmann is Managing Director of Collion Verwaltungs GmbH, the general partner of Collion GmbH & Co. KG. He has worked in electronics development for more than forty years, some twenty of them mainly as a consultant inside his clients' development departments.