Philip Howard's Raspberry Pi Pico GPIO Pinout Python Program Prints Pins at Your Terminal
Designed for quick reference without having to leave the terminal, this smart program lets you drill down or search for a pin.
Pimoroni's Philip Howard has created a quick-reference system for anyone working with the Raspberry Pi Pico or Raspberry Pi Pico W — offering a look at every available pin on the boards right at the terminal, using a smart Python program.
"I got in a bit of a slump yesterday," Howard explains of the project's origins, "and needed to do something so I wrote (or at least started writing) a command-line version of Pico Pinout that's searchable and configurable."
The project is an expansion to Howard's existing Pinout.xyz, a browser-based interactive guide to the general-purpose input/output (GPIO) pins available on the Raspberry Pi single-board computers and compatible accessories. Pico Pinout, as the name suggests, focuses instead on the Raspberry Pi Pico and Raspberry Pi Pico W RP2040 microcontroller development boards — but this new variant doesn't need you to leave the terminal to look up a pin's functionality.
"This project was inspired by GPIO Zero's command-line pinout," Howard explains. "It somehow wasn't inspired by Raspberry Pi Spy's 'picopins,' which came first and solves the same problem in bash." Howard's solution, by contrast, uses Python, and comes with some interesting features — including the ability to show only pins matching particular interface types or to find pins based on free-text or regular expression (regex) queries.
The source code for Howard's software is available on GitHub under the permissive MIT license; it can be installed on any device capable of running the pip Python package manager with python3 -m pip install picopins.
