Raspberry Pi history, versions, pins and headers as a Java Maven library

The best way to understand and learn something new, is to document it yourself. That’s what I’m doing in every step for my book-in-progress. And to fully get the pinnings and headers of the different Pi-boards, I decided to gather all info into a Java library with different enums to be able to auto-generate some content for the book and use in a few different example applications.

Maven repository

A first version is now available on Maven, but will definitely be further extended as I’m working on the content of the book.

Source code

The sources are available on GitHub. For example the list of available pin types:

public enum PinType {
    POWER("Power", 0x990000),
    GROUND("Ground", 0x000000),
    DIGITAL("Digital", 0x009900),
    DIGITAL_AND_PWM("Digital and PWM", 0xff7ff00),
    DIGITAL_NO_PULL_DOWN("Digital without pulldown", 0x800080);

    ...
}

Example application: JavaFX visualization

As an example in the book this library is used to automatically generate this JavaFX view of a Pi header:

Auto-generated README

Some code in the sources (UpdateReadme.java) automatically generates a new readme file with all the info from the enums.

Pi models

Pi major versions

Pi board versions

Pin types

Pin functions

Header types

8pin header

26pin header

40pin header