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getting-started-with-gpio.md

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Getting Started With GPIO

Before You Start Coding...

Ensure you have installed gpio-admin and are in the gpio group. Run the groups command to list your group membership. For example:

$ groups
pi adm dialout cdrom sudo audio video plugdev games users netdev input indiecity

If you don't see gpio in the list, you can add yourself to the gpio group with the command:

sudo adduser $USER gpio

You must then log out and in again for Linux to apply the change in group membership.

$ groups
pi adm dialout cdrom sudo audio video plugdev games users netdev input indiecity gpio

Now Let's Write Some Code!

The GPIO pins are controlled by Pin objects, and those Pin objects are managed by a "pin bank". The simplest pin bank to use is called pins and gives access to the pins labelled P0 to P7 on the Quick2Wire interface board (or named GPIO0 to GPIO7 on the Raspberry Pi's header number 1). There's also a bank called pi_header_1 that gives access to all the header pins, but we don't need that for this example.

Python programs must import the pins pin bank from the quick2wire.gpio module, along with constants to configure the pin:

from quick2wire.gpio import pins, In, Out

Then you can get a Pin by calling the pin bank's pin method. This takes two arguments: the pin number and whether the pin is to be used for input or output.

in_pin = pins.pin(0, direction=In)
out_pin = pins.pin(1, direction=Out)

You must open a pin before you can read or write its value and close the pin when you no longer need it. The most convenient way to do this is to use Python's with statement, which will open the pins at the start of the statement and close them when the body of the statement has finished running, even if the user kills the program or failure makes the code throw an exception.

with in_pin, out_pin:
    out_pin.value = 1
    print(in_pin.value)

A pin has a value of 1 when high, a value of 0 when low.

Putting it all together into a single program:

from quick2wire.gpio import pins, In, Out

in_pin = pins.pin(0, direction=In)
out_pin = pins.pin(1, direction=Out)

with in_pin, out_pin:
    out_pin.value = 1
    print(in_pin.value)

Here's a slightly more complicated example that blinks an LED attached to pin 1. This will loop forever until the user stops it with a Control-C.

from time import sleep
from quick2wire.gpio import pins, Out

with pins.pin(1, direction=Out) as pin:
    while True:
        pin.value = 1 - pin.value
        sleep(1)