[HN Gopher] Show HN: Interactive pinout for the Raspberry Pi Pico 2
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Show HN: Interactive pinout for the Raspberry Pi Pico 2
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
Author : gadgetoid
Score : 122 points
Date : 2025-07-07 16:01 UTC (4 days ago)
(HTM) web link (pico2.pinout.xyz)
(TXT) w3m dump (pico2.pinout.xyz)
| djaychela wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Thank you. You're welcome on both counts!
| lawik wrote:
| pinout.xyz is a treasure when working with Pis in general.
| mrheosuper wrote:
| 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.
| iamflimflam1 wrote:
| Definitely - the ESP32S3 is an absolute joy to work with and
| layout.
| gadgetoid wrote:
| 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.
| moffkalast wrote:
| 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.
| Zanfa wrote:
| For inspiration, STM32Cube is otherwise PoS software, but it
| has a pretty decent utility for exactly this for most of their
| STM32 MCU lineup. Why they didn't just make it a website is
| beyond me, but it is what it is.
| gadgetoid wrote:
| 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.
|
| 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44520091
| ksdme9 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Agreed. Thanks!
|
| I have definitely struggled with making the Pinout spinoffs
| discoverable- the OG site had ten plus years to bed in.
| bajsejohannes wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| gadgetoid wrote:
| 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.
|
| 1. https://pi.pinout.xyz 2. https://rp2350a.pinout.xyz
| ssl232 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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!
| gadgetoid wrote:
| Thanks... urge to build a version for ESP32-C5-DevKitC-1
| rising...
| gadgetoid wrote:
| Nerd snipe successful.
|
| (very beta website)
|
| https://esp32c5.pinout.xyz
| NoSalt wrote:
| This is AWESOME ... thank you!
| polivier wrote:
| I've used your pinouts a ton in the past for my small Raspberry
| Pi projects, good job and thank you!
| coffeecoders wrote:
| This is great, I wish we had something similar for ESP and even
| Arduino. I have been following this [1] for the later.
|
| [1] https://deepbluembedded.com/arduino-uno-pinout/
| gadgetoid wrote:
| 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.
|
| Will be an interesting experiment!
| coffeecoders wrote:
| I had something similar a few years ago. I ended up creating
| a json for the pinout and using jinja2 to spit out svg. It
| didn't turn out great.
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(page generated 2025-07-11 23:01 UTC)