The Pinouts Book by NODE
pinouts.org
pinouts.org
For more obscure pinouts, I still check https://pinouts.ru/
One of my favorite resources on the Web. Information-dense, loads fast, easy to navigate.
Spreading the content over 2 pages makes it very unusable. Displaying 2 pages side by side makes the content too small to read. Having every 2nd page color inverted makes it unprintable. It's also annoying if (like me) you invert the colors on your e-reader or PDF viewer.
I also noticed the index doesn't have hyperlinks to the content pages and it doesn't appear to have a working table of contents making it even more difficult to use on an e-reader.
I like the concept but the implementation has serious usability issues.
Timestamp 1:32 - Video shows that there are clickable links that will bring you to more detailed reference pages; so I assume that if the stylistic layout choices makes it unusable for you, you can always open up the the external reference pages.
Kinda wish they'd stuck with that. It feels like they made a bunch of decisions in the design that made sense in that context, but would have not been ideal choices if you were designing it as an online reference.
Still cool, and glad they did it and made it available. Hopefully the license means we'll see some nice improvements.
It would seem a bit lacking in context without the video intro, though, to understand that it wasn't necessarily meant to be consumed in the format they've giving you now.
This problem is solved quite neatly here using multiple drawings of the connectors from different angles, arranged in a logical way around the main pinout drawing.
With these drawings it's impossible to understand how high speed contacts in USB 3.0 Type A work, you need cutouts for this.
For Ethernet ("RJ45") T568B wiring is just plain wrong about colours, looks like copy-paste mistake.
Nowhere proper names for modular connectors are specified.
MMC picture and pinout show only slowest 7 pin version.
I don't understand how boards and chips were chosen for inclusion.
They have a print zine or two released previously
This is brilliant, and I think it would get more attention if they mentioned up front that it is licensed under Creative Commons cc-by-sa.
Some years ago I thought about downloading the whole of pinouts.ru (not this pinouts.org) to encode all the connectors as a database, then build an interface to it that would allow me to specify things like “cable, male DB9 rs-232-c, male RJ-45 Cisco” and get a diagram seen from the back of each connector, ready to solder the cables without the uncertainty of pinout sketches of different provenance and image quality. For instance, the side of the connector view is not always clear.
One reason for not even starting is their restrictive license. My understanding is that the facts of which pin has which function are not protected by copyright (although collections of facts are in the EU), but it would be a lot of work anyway so the uncertainty added an excuse to be lazy.
With this one there are no questions about the license, and I could even extract the drawings on the left side to SVG for instance, mark the coordinates of each pin (might be worth to semi-automate) and then have things like selecting some pins in the table at the right side, a color gets picked automatically, then a line with that color goes to the pin in the diagram. Then I could mark the pins I’m interested it at a given moment and see them at a glance.
7 years ago I did an experiment in that direction, an HTML view of the Parallella single board computer derived from their PDF, for instance this search finds labels containing USB: https://demo.sentido-labs.com/parallella/schematic/#usb The buttons under the the input box at the top show the search results, clicking on each brings you to the corresponding page with a homing circle to show you where it is.