DEV Community

TinkerNews
TinkerNews

Posted on

We catalogued 3,046 dev boards. Here is what the data says about pin documentation

#arduino #esp32 #hardware #opensource

While curating weekly DIY electronics builds, the same failure keeps coming back: a project says "wire it up like this", and the board's actual pinout is either unfindable or exists only as a photo shot through a fishbowl. So we did the boring thing and collected board definitions instead of complaining.

What the dataset is

3,046 board definitions, imported from open upstream projects (Zephyr, Arduino, CircuitPython, Armbian and friends) and normalised to one shape: name, maker, chip, software support records, and pin data where the upstream project provides it. It is open at github.com/tinkernews/boards and browsable at tinkernews.com/boards.

The numbers (as of today)

  • 3,046 boards, 565 makers
  • 2,644 microcontroller boards, 402 single board computers
  • Biggest silicon families: ESP32 (504 boards), RP2040 (145), SAMD21G18 (112), nRF52840 (99)
  • Most represented vendors: STMicroelectronics (220), Adafruit (187), NXP (115)
  • The number four "vendor" is generic: 106 boards with no brand to name at all
  • Software support is tracked well: 97% of boards carry at least one support record (Zephyr 1,146, Arduino 863, CircuitPython 674)
  • Pin data is not: only 591 boards (19%) expose machine-readable pins. The other 2,455 do not. Where pin data exists it averages 26 pins per board

What that says

The ecosystem documents software extensively and hardware pins barely at all. The pin table is the first thing a beginner needs and the last thing anyone maintains. It is also where a large share of bench failures start: a GPIO that looks free, a strapping pin that is not, a 3.3V rail that browns out.

So the dataset stays open (per-board JSON, a schema, corrections welcome via the repo), and we build the missing layer on top: printable pinout charts for the boards people actually hold (ESP32 DevKit, ESP32-C3 SuperMini), plus the bench calculators that catch the classic traps (voltage drop, WS2812B power, battery life) at tinkernews.com/tools.

If you have an upstream board definition we are missing, the repo is the place. If you just want one solid build in your inbox every week, TinkerNews is free.

Top comments (0)