10 Pin IDC Locking Right Angle Header

Jargon buster

Plain-language definitions for the technical terms used above.

Headers

Rows of connector contacts on a fixed pitch (commonly 2.54 mm) used to link a board to a breadboard, jumper wires, or another board. They come as male pin headers and female socket headers; when a module ships with pre-soldered headers it can be used straight away, whereas bare pads require soldering the pins yourself.

ISP

In electronics, ISP usually means In-System Programming, a way to load firmware onto a microcontroller while it stays on the board (often via an ICSP header), or an Image Signal Processor, hardware that turns raw camera sensor data into usable images and offloads the main CPU. The surrounding context shows which meaning applies.

JTAG

JTAG is a hardware debugging and programming interface used to inspect and control chips at a low level. It matters for advanced development because it can help diagnose firmware problems that are hard to see through normal serial output.

PCB

A printed circuit board (PCB) is a board, usually rigid, with etched copper tracks that connect electronic components together without loose wiring. Components are mounted on the board and signals route between them through the copper layout.

SWD

Serial Wire Debug (SWD) is a two-wire programming and debugging interface used with many ARM Cortex-M microcontrollers. It provides low-level access to program, recover or debug the microcontroller.