Unless I’m missing it, the Thing Plus RP2350 doesn’t seem to have a pinout diagram published anywhere. This is the first dev board I’ve purchased in the last 15 years that didn’t have an easily accessible pinout guide, and I’ve apparently taken for granted that any board of this caliber will naturally have one.
Anyone know why this is missing, or if SparkFun might remedy that? Hunting through the schematics and docs for anything other than primary interface pins is a painful process.
If you’re after a graphical datasheet (that we have for some products) it doesn’t look like we have one, but the pins are labeled
Right, but as I said, the labels and schematics are only useful for primary interfaces and nomenclature. They’re almost entirely unhelpful for alternate pin mappings and secondary nomenclature. The attached are proper SF pinout diagrams. It’s easy to see the vast difference in the amount and clarity of pinout information presented vs a standard schematic. This extra info is essential for students, beginners, or any situation where speed if of the essence. (I work in both education and engineering, so all of those apply.)
Take the HSTX interface for example…where is it? The RP2350 datasheet says the chip can employ GPIO 12-19 for HSTX, but the Thing Plus schematic shows pins 13-15 already in use. So that means we can only use 16-19 for HSTX? Only by digging into the separate ‘Vision Demo’ document could I confiem those 4 pins are the ones SF used in their example…but are those the only 4 pins we can use for HSTX? So that’s three separate documents I had to reference to get information that should be accessible at a glance on a pinout diagram, and I’m not even sure it’s complete information. Definitely not what I’ve come to expect from Sparkfun on a $30 board.
My bigger concern is when did this piece of industry-standard documentation become optional for Sparkfun on its premium dev boards? Hopefully this isn’t a new standard for SF, or there will likely be far fewer red colored boards on our workbenches going forward. (Not naming any names, but every other black, blue, and green RP2350 dev board I can find appears to have a proper pinout guide published…)
