I’ve been spending a lot of time with the chipKIT Cmod. It’s quickly becoming one of my favorite chipKIT boards to quickly prototype with.
However, I have one complaint.
I never know which pin is which…
I had been spoiled by the nice silkscreening on the larger chipKIT boards.
On the Cmod, space is tight, all the way to the edges, so they had to put machine pins versus the standard 0.1 spaced headers (because of the solder sizes) and chose the smallest surface month resistor size possible.
There are two places you can find the pin assignments on the Cmod to use. The first is the pin documentation tables in the reference manual and the second is the Board Def file for MPIDE.
But both of those are irritating to do while I am in the middle of assembling a project, and I am one of those annoying engineers that plan my project perfectly ahead of time (when I have my computer at my finger tips and a notepad and pencil to write down the pin assignments). Plus, my projects change constantly and I am re-wiring my Cmod as the project changes…
I needed a quick way to see the pin assignments.
A few months ago, Jay posted a pin map of the WF32.
Although it’s complicated (the WF32 is a much more complicated board), it got the pin assignments across pretty straightforwardly.
That would be perfect for the Cmod.
After doing a little research how people created these pin maps a (thank you Rei Villo from Embedded Computing), a draft of the Cmod pin map has been made!
Now that I have the pin-out diagram, I can print it out and put it in places it’s more useful for me, like in the box that I carry it in.
There are a few templates that can be shared (if wanted, I’ll make sure to watch the comments or the forum thread), but I love having the pin-out diagram easily accessible in places that the board is getting used.
So, what do you think about pin maps? Are they useful? Where else would you put them (in case I overlooked something)? Please let me know in the comments (or if you want to help make pin maps, let me know also, we could work out a free-board-in-exchange-deal).
