Comment by gadgetoid

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.

1. https://github.com/pinout-xyz/pinout-2024/blob/main/chips/bc... 2. https://github.com/pinout-xyz/pinout-2024/blob/main/boards/r... 3. https://rp2350a.pinout.xyz