4 ms·

The Pinouts Book by NODE

94 points by jrmann100 5y ago

jrmann100 5y ago
This was announced on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qz2P9celU1M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qz2P9celU1M
alexmcc81 5y ago
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/ https://pinouts.ru/
- sidpatil 5y ago
  > For more obscure pinouts, I still check https://pinouts.ru/ https://pinouts.ru/ One of my favorite resources on the Web. Information-dense, loads fast, easy to navigate.
  - laurensr 5y ago
    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
  - splitbrain 5y ago
    There's also https://pinout.xyz/boards https://pinout.xyz/boards
- ricc 5y ago
  It will make more sense if you watch the video announcing the release: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qz2P9celU1M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qz2P9celU1M
  - alexmcc81 5y ago
    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 5y ago
      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 5y ago
        > 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 5y ago
        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.
        abeyer 5y ago
        Yeah, perhaps the intent is to just get people interested and bootstrap an eventual printing via merch sales? 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.
- RF_Savage 5y ago
  Yeah. Strange that it's a monolithic pdf instead of a site like their main competition pinouts.ru.
tpmx 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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 5y ago
Copying my own comment in lobste.rs a few minutes ago: https://lobste.rs/s/db5t25/pinouts_book#c_ntyhse 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 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.
worldmerge 5y ago
Really cool!!
thinkmassive 5y ago
Very cool, this is by the same behind https://n-o-d-e.net/ https://n-o-d-e.net/ They have a print zine or two released previously
anonymfus 5y ago
3.5 mm TRRS connector is shown in CTIA (Left-Right-Ground-Mic) configuration, but OMTP (Left-Right-Mic-Ground) still occurs in the wild. 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.
squarefoot 5y ago
Also worth mentioning the Hardware Book, which if memory serves dates back to before 2000. http://www.hardwarebook.info/ http://www.hardwarebook.info/

94 points by jrmann100 5y ago

This was announced on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qz2P9celU1M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qz2P9celU1M

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/ https://pinouts.ru/

sidpatil 5y ago
> For more obscure pinouts, I still check https://pinouts.ru/ https://pinouts.ru/ One of my favorite resources on the Web. Information-dense, loads fast, easy to navigate.
- laurensr 5y ago
  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
- splitbrain 5y ago
  There's also https://pinout.xyz/boards https://pinout.xyz/boards
ricc 5y ago
It will make more sense if you watch the video announcing the release: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qz2P9celU1M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qz2P9celU1M
- alexmcc81 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    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 5y ago
      > 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 5y ago
        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.
        abeyer 5y ago
        Yeah, perhaps the intent is to just get people interested and bootstrap an eventual printing via merch sales? 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.
RF_Savage 5y ago
Yeah. Strange that it's a monolithic pdf instead of a site like their main competition pinouts.ru.

tpmx 5y ago

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 5y ago
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 5y ago

Copying my own comment in lobste.rs a few minutes ago: https://lobste.rs/s/db5t25/pinouts_book#c_ntyhse 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 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.

worldmerge 5y ago

Really cool!!

thinkmassive 5y ago

Very cool, this is by the same behind https://n-o-d-e.net/ https://n-o-d-e.net/ They have a print zine or two released previously

anonymfus 5y ago

3.5 mm TRRS connector is shown in CTIA (Left-Right-Ground-Mic) configuration, but OMTP (Left-Right-Mic-Ground) still occurs in the wild. 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.

squarefoot 5y ago

Also worth mentioning the Hardware Book, which if memory serves dates back to before 2000. http://www.hardwarebook.info/ http://www.hardwarebook.info/