Mar 112017
 

My Espruino has colored I/O pins and since I saw this, I thought “That’s neat!”

Playing with the Orange Pi Zero and its 26 pin expansion port made me really want those colored pins as connecting things wrong can destroy ports quickly: 5V and 3.3V mixed up? Magic smoke escapes. Connected GND instead of I/O pin? 50% chance of a dead output port. Miss-counted pins and used pin 11 instead of 13…happy debugging!

The Asus Tinkerboard has it too:

but it seems this is not available without the rest of the Tinkerboard.

I had to build one from coloured 40 pin single row pins I got from AliExpress:

And here is the result:

Red is +5V, yellow is +3.3V, black is GND, blue is I²C and green is SPI. I don use UARTs a lot, so I did not bother to colour those.

Took about 15min of work incl. soldering. Totally worth it.