Allister,

I tried to design a small PCB with some small wires soldered on their sides matching the pads of the chip. Tinning 8 pads and expecting for them to be all the same thickness seams kind of hard to do. Nevertheless my plan did not work because it is a small small world but you gave me a good idea. I will design a PCB which will contain an ICSP header and insert pogo pins to line up with some exposed traces on my production PCB and I will simply press this programming PCB to program the chip on the production board.

That should work fine.

Thanks for the tip.

Mike