I’m more troubled by the fact these emails are hitting my sendgrid only email address.
Is this related to the breach that SendGrid said didn’t happen? I set my account up in 2021 for reasons I don’t recall and it’s since been deleted/deactivated by them.
Though STM32Cube has a very different approach, handles lots of mutually exclusive features and peripherals and a bunch of extra stuff for controlling code gen IIRC.
I've thought about this on and off for years, trying to find a way to boil the stuff I've learned making Pinouts into some kind of tool.
There are a surprising number of pitfalls, since there's always some complexity most top-level diagrams don't reveal, but I feel is necessary to capture/avoid duplication of work- specifically, I mean documenting the pinout of the chip (RP2350, ATMEGA32U4, STM32H750, RP2 etc) and then translating that to a board layout.
I think the closest I've come is a prototype Pinout rewrite which started with chip [1] and board [2] JSON files.
Then, as you explore, there's the whole problem of presenting this information. I chose to capture information such as header type, orientation and pin-count but sometimes a header is too small (or there are too many headers) to document in-band so the kinda skeuomorphic presentation of the Pico pinouts doesn't work.
Perhaps that's where something like the minimap [3] from my "advanced" RP2350A pinout comes in.
Having a small representation of the board with the pin headers separate could work. It's been a while, IIRC a Fritzing [4] part involved creating a vector graphic of a part and naming the individual pin objects such that they could be mapped to a table of signals. I think SVG is compatible with this approach but... yeah, requiring people to create detailed board artwork (as good as it looks) is a stretch. The same could work for a good photo and just a table of offsets, as you suggest.
TLDR: This is a great idea and something I've wanted to do for ages. But I don't think I've got enough breadth of experience to do it alone.
It seems like the "Photo and offsets" approach is pretty commonly used, and I can't personally say I have any complaints, even though the CLI enjoyers might disagree.
Maybe it could be paired with a basic image generator for common layouts?
Or maybe it could just have a set of selectable hardcoded layout engines, since "counterclockwise from upper left" and "across then down" cover a lot of things.
"Base64 of an images plus and offsets table" could just be a layout type, and people could submit PRs for anything else.
Maybe it could be something like:
Your pin(or callout) Tables
Your Sections, which could have an image and some text
Your Images, that would either be literal pictures or rendering instructions that reference a table
So you could have a complete cheat sheet for any device on one page.
In typical fashion I got nerd-sniped into making an ESP32 C5 DevKit-1 pinout. I've disappeared down a hole of making the perfect SVG for the board art.
Incredible! Funny enough of all the dozen different Esp32 boards I’ve collected that’s the one I don’t have. If I ever have the time I may try to do some legwork for you for the c3 and c3-supermini if that would be helpful
Once I get the hand of the ESP’s idiosyncratic signal names (I don’t have much experience with them) I should be able to crank them out. But help would be appreciated, thanks - even a canonical list of the pins and functions would be super useful. I get the sense I’m missing something referencing only their pinout diagram.
Agreed. Click-to-select-related-pins is something I've been experimenting with on a cut-down Raspberry Pi Pinout [1]
And code gen is something I'm looking at with the RP2350A pinout [2] where the JSON export would allow someone to plug it into any tool they like. (KiCAD symbol gen, C/MicroPython init code, etc)
It's difficult to strike a balance between features/minimalism but I'm increasingly drawn to the idea of a full (STM32Cube-like if you're familiar with it) configurator for Pico/RP2 based boards.
I recently started building something like this for the RP2350A chip [1], deeply inspired by both STM32Cube and also by avoiding recreating the horror of STM32Cube.
I’m currently failing to not build STM32Cube for Pico though, the idea keeps gnawing away at me. There are some idiosyncrasies that my micro site doesn’t quite capture. Though perhaps it could.
Is this related to the breach that SendGrid said didn’t happen? I set my account up in 2021 for reasons I don’t recall and it’s since been deleted/deactivated by them.
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