PinConnect

An interactive pinout generator for PCBs. PinConnect turns a photo of a board into an interactive pinout diagram you can open in a browser or embed in a documentation site.

A generated pinout for the Birds' Nest CAN board — hover a connector on the board for its pinout, or open the connector list to browse every connector at once.

It is made of three tools, used in sequence:

• pinout-design: a browser-based designer that turns a board image into a TOML config.
• pinout-gen: a CLI that reads that config and generates a single interactive HTML pinout.
• pinout-embed: an optional Markdown extension that embeds the generated HTML into MkDocs / Zensical sites.

You only need the first two for a working pinout; the third is for publishing to a Markdown docs site.

If you'd like to see a live demo of the generated pinouts, you can find it on this documentation website: https://docs.isiks.tech/pinouts/bnc/bnc.pinout.html

Quick start

1. Serve the designer and open it in your browser:

   cd pinout_design
   python -m http.server 8000   # then open http://localhost:8000

   Load a board image, draw a box over each connector, label the pins, and Save TOML.

2. Install the generator and render your config:

   pip install ./pinout_gen
   pinout-gen board.toml         # writes board.pinout.html

3. (Optional) Embed the result in an MkDocs / Zensical page — see pinout-embed.

Full walkthrough: docs/getting-started.md.

Documentation

All guides live in the docs/ folder — start with the documentation index:

• Getting Started
• Concepts
• pinout-design
• pinout-gen
• pinout-embed

Repository layout

• pinout_design/: the visual designer (static web app).
• pinout_gen/: the pinout-gen CLI, connector type library, and themes.
• pinout_embed/: the Markdown embedding extension.
• docs/: documentation.

Each package folder has its own README with a short overview.

Roadmap

PinConnect already generates great interactive pinouts. All known bugs are already fixed and most planned features are already added. It's already being used for all recent and future Isik's Tech pinouts.

Below are some of the remaining planned features:

• 2-row pin headers
• "None" connector option
• Zoom & drag for interactive pinouts
• Smarter pinout auto-scaling
• Smarter bottom pill text wrap logic
• Stretch goal: More advanced theming features

License

This project is licensed under GPL-3.0. See LICENSE.

If you'd like to support the development of this and other open-source projects, you can donate on GitHub Sponsors or Patreon.