HN Explorer

Show HN: Interactive pinout for the Raspberry Pi Pico 2 (pico2.pinout.xyz)

150 points by gadgetoid ↗ HN
I've been trying to make accessible and beautiful GPIO pinouts since I started one for the Raspberry Pi in 2013 [1]. I've since given the Raspberry Pi Pico [2] and Pico 2 [3] microcontrollers the same treatment when they launched.

Recently I've updated these with a new "Upside-down" view to complement the rear view, giving a pinout in the right orientation to match your project.

The Pico sites are all hand-coded single HTML pages with supporting CSS and minimal JS. They are set up to optionally install as a "Desktop" web app. They also degrade into a somewhat usable table in lieu of CSS and use vector graphics (for the board itself) to be viewable and printable at any size.

Finally, hidden behind "Advanced" is a pinout of the test pads and special function pins!

[1] - https://web.archive.org/web/20130505194305/pi.gadgetoid.com/... [2] - https://pico.pinout.xyz [3] - https://pico2.pinout.xyz

21 comments

[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 47.2 ms ] thread
djaychela
That's really good as all the pinouts give all the extras on which can be overwhelming. Being able to just see the PWM capable outputs for instance is much nicer. And they look fantastic.

Thanks for your pimoroni [1] work as well, I've used quite a few products and they're always easy to work with because of good software and examples.

[1] - https://shop.pimoroni.com/

gadgetoid
Thank you. You’re welcome on both counts!
lawik
pinout.xyz is a treasure when working with Pis in general.
mrheosuper
I wish many manufactures would begin adding Pin mux inside MCU, like espressif. So most of the time you don't care which pin has which function, and make designing pcb for it much less painful.
gadgetoid
PIO kinda sorta does this but yeah the Pico could definitely benefit from a more flexible pin mux, since bringing up PIO peripherals is messy.

Pico never quite has a function where it’s needed.

jamesmunns
Nordic's nRF family is the major other vendor I've seen doing this, almost all peripheral can be on any pin. It's definitely a big help for designing boards.
moffkalast
That's pretty nice, a lot like pinout.xyz as others mention. Something that would really set it apart would be to be able to select pins and functionality and have other pins greyed out that can't be used in parallel.

At least that's my main pain point when working with microcontrollers. They give you like 20 pins and you plan out all the functionality and then it turns out that one of those pins is like an EEPROM pin that needs to be low at boot or linked to something else internally or some shenanigans like that and the idea is actually completely impossible to implement (looking at you ESP32-CAM lmao). Or PWM channel conflicts that set some specific sets of pins to the same frequency and the like. It would be such a great workflow step to be able to verify if something would theoretically work given the known limitations at least.

Microcontrollers are like if a PC had 4 USB ports and if you used two of them the third and fourth just stopped working cause nobody intended all four to be used at the same time. Absolutely maddening.

ksdme9
This looks awesome, thanks! The best thing about this imo is that I can remember the url instead of having to dig through pages to find the official pinout pdf.
geerlingguy
And the nice thing is it's usually at the top of search results since it's been a high quality, simple resource for years (maybe even a decade at this point?). Definitely the canonical reference (outside of the official docs, which aren't quite as user friendly).
bajsejohannes
Thanks! I've been using pinout.xyz quite a few times; maybe you should link from there to the pico versions so it's easier to discover?
gadgetoid
Agreed. Thanks!

I have definitely struggled with making the Pinout spinoffs discoverable- the OG site had ten plus years to bed in.

bajsejohannes
Another version that's useful is this ASCII version: https://gabmus.org/posts/raspberry_pi_pico_pinout_in_your_te...

I keep a slightly modified version of it as a top comment in my main C file in every pico project. Super handy for quick reference and you can annotate it with the actual uses in your project.

gadgetoid
I did something like this called “picopins” (pip install picopins) which gave a CLI ASCII-like pinout with search.

ASCII-only really cuts to the meat of the problem though.

varispeed
A suggestion. It would be nice if I click on e.g. "SPI0" it should highlight all pins related to SPI0.

Bonus points if it could generate example initialisation code for the selected pins on the fly or maybe even an example snippet of code to get the peripheral going.

ssl232
Thank you. I found this years ago and look it up every time I’m working on a Raspberry Pi project. Keep up the good work!
transcriptase
This is amazing, thank you! If anyone knows of something similar for any of the more popular Esp32 boards I would love to know about it!
NoSalt
This is AWESOME ... thank you!
polivier
I've used your pinouts a ton in the past for my small Raspberry Pi projects, good job and thank you!
eternityforest
This is really cool!

I especially love the ability to flip and reverse things, since I try to avoid comparing any two objects in different orientations, to cut down on mistakes.

It would be really cool if the community had a more general purpose open standard interactive diagramming tool for this sort of thing.

I guess the easy way would be to mark up photographs with pin locations, which would map to pins in a table, allowing for multiple tables in a document.

I'm not sure how you'd capture the data in a way that could be rendered to something like a screen reader or a more abstract diagram though, without a lot of complexity and edge cases.

Would it be enough to just verbally describe the mapping between pin numbers and the physical layout, as in "Across then down, starting at upper left", or would you need a meta data scheme for that?