[HN Gopher] The Pinouts Book by NODE
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The Pinouts Book by NODE
Author : jrmann100
Score : 66 points
Date : 2021-12-25 07:59 UTC (15 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (pinouts.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (pinouts.org)
| alexmcc81 wrote:
| It looks like a good resource but why distribute it as a PDF and
| not a searchable webpage? And why put the diagrams and tables on
| different pages?
|
| For more obscure pinouts, I still check https://pinouts.ru/
| ricc wrote:
| It will make more sense if you watch the video announcing the
| release: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qz2P9celU1M
| alexmcc81 wrote:
| It really doesn't explain why they chose a book as their
| format over a searchable website or why they chose a 2 page
| layout, with one color inverted.
|
| 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.
| ricc wrote:
| Timestamp 0:45 - "It was originally designed to be a
| *physical* book but we realized it made more sense to be
| downloadable."
|
| 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.
| abeyer wrote:
| > It was originally designed to be a _physical_ book but
| we realized it made more sense to be downloadable
|
| 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.
| ricc wrote:
| I personally don't think the current iteration is meant
| to be an _online_ reference. I look at it not even as an
| ebook but a simple digital copy of a book.
| RF_Savage wrote:
| Yeah. Strange that it's a monolithic pdf instead of a site like
| their main competition pinouts.ru.
| sidpatil wrote:
| > 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.
| splitbrain wrote:
| There's also https://pinout.xyz/boards
| laurensr wrote:
| The remarkable thing is that it is fast and SEO-friendly out
| of the box because it doesn't use any kind of SPA framework
| tpmx wrote:
| When googling random pinout drawings from the web it's often very
| unclear whether the pinout drawing is showing e.g. the connector
| from the front or from the back (solder side).
|
| 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.
| abeyer wrote:
| I wish at least for cables/connectors they'd done both male &
| female pinouts and standard footprint layouts vs having a bunch
| of ortho projections of a cable that don't really add any
| value.
| AlbertoGP wrote:
| Copying my own comment in lobste.rs a few minutes ago:
| https://lobste.rs/s/db5t25/pinouts_book#c_ntyhse
|
| 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.
| jrmann100 wrote:
| This was announced on YouTube:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qz2P9celU1M
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(page generated 2021-12-25 23:01 UTC)