My buddy said that he wants esp programmer which will not use any precious space on his esp board and the programmer should be able to power the board, reset the esp, and make it go into flash mode. This means that we need 6 lines: VCC, GND, RESET, TX, RX, BOOT.
Do you imagine how much space 5 goldpins take? 12.5mm^2. UNACCEPTABLE.
We sat down to preferred graphic editor and started cracking. We agreed that main drive for this project is coolness factor. We disregarded any common sense arguments and designed something fun. The only barrier we would never cross - it had to be usable. As pogo-pins are cool we wanted to use them to touch exposed esp-12E module pads from the top. 6 pogo pins cost roughly 7 chocolate bars where i live, and I'm talking about the cheapest pins, not the slim ones that i wanted. So I re-implemented my idea from previous project and used old bass guitar strings as pogo pins. The main and only non-passive components of PCB are CH341 USB to UART converter and AMS1117 regulator.