Hacker News Reader

Comment by PragmaticPulp | Hacker News Reader

This is a well-executed tool.

I hesitate to criticize, but I think it's a step backwards for usability in the current form. Having to individually mouse over every single pin to see what it does is the least efficient way to find the pin I need.

Ideally, the tool would show all of the pin short labels and then allow me to hover over to highlight connected nets and show the full description.

View on HN

The favorite schematics I've worked with on complex embedded parts were where the EE would do breakout pages where the common reference pins were collected together by chip and/or by major subsystem (interface pin blocks, power, bus, peripherals, eth-comms, etc).

In a diagram like this, some side index of topics where a hover would light up multiple pins tagged with that with that topic might be interesting.

Isn't that what the groups at the top are? You can select for it to highlight pins related to certain port like I2C, SPI, Serial or certain IO pin capabilities ADC, PWM, interrupt pins.

Yes, but once you have a group picked out, it would be nice if a lot of the other content was hidden and the labels were shown. To do it automatically, is an exercise in space and visual clutter tradeoffs, I'd be as happy to see hiding of any unrelated component, or a schematic subpage, etc. Doing automatically is the hard part, as I know the past the EEs were thoughtful enough to spend some time building topic subpages by hand with maybe minor help w/ their schematic app.

Not meant to be a discouraging comment, as is, it is a nice utility!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com