Physical computing is one of the most engaging classroom activities, and it’s at the heart of most projects we see in the community. From flashing lights to IoT smart homes, the Pi’s GPIO pins make programming objects in the real world accessible to everybody.
Some three years ago, Ben Croston created a Python library called RPi.GPIO, which he used as part of his beer brewing process. This allowed people to control GPIO pins from their Python programs, and became a hit both in education and in personal projects. We use it in many of our free learning resources.
However, recently I’ve been thinking of ways to make this code seem more accessible. I created some simple and obvious interfaces for a few of the components I had lying around on my desk – namely the brilliant CamJam EduKits. I added interfaces for LED, Button and Buzzer, and started to look at some more interesting components – sensors, motors and even a few simple add-on boards. I got some great help from Dave Jones, author of the excellent picamera library, who added some really clever aspects to the library. I decided to call it GPIO Zero as it shares the same philosophy as PyGame Zero, which requires minimal boilerplate code to get started.
This is how you flash an LED using GPIO Zero:
from gpiozero import LED
from time import sleep
led = LED(17)
while True:
led.on()
sleep(1)
led.off()
sleep(1)(Also see the built-in blink method)
As well as controlling individual components in obvious ways, you can also connect multiple components together.
Here’s an example of controlling an LED with a push button:
from gpiozero import LED, Button
from signal import pause
led = LED(17)
button = Button(2)
button.when_pressed = led.on
button.when_released = led.off
pause()We’ve thought really hard to try to get the naming right, and hope people old and young will find the library intuitive once shown a few simple examples. The API has been designed with education in mind and I’ve been demoing it to teachers to get feedback and they love it! Another thing is the idea of minimal configuration – so to use a button you don’t have to think about pull-ups and pull-downs – all you need is the pin number it’s connected to. Of course you can specify this – but the default assumes the common pull-up circuit. For example:
button_1 = Button(4) # connected to GPIO pin 4, pull-up
button_2 = Button(5, pull_up=False) # connected to GPIO pin 5, pull-downNormally, if you want to detect the button being pressed you have to think about the edge falling if it’s pulled up, or rising if it’s pulled down. With GPIO Zero, the edge is configured when you create the Button object, so things like when_pressed, when_released, wait_for_press, wait_for_release just work as expected. While understanding edges is important in electronics, I don’t think it should be essential for anyone who wants to create a simple interactive project.
Here’s a list of devices which currently supported:
- LED (also PWM LED allowing change of brightness)
- RGB LED
- Buzzer
- Motor
- Button
- Motion Sensor
- Light Sensor
- Analogue-to-Digital converters MCP3004 and MCP3008
- Robot
Also collections of components like LEDBoard (for any collection of LEDs), FishDish, Traffic HAT, generic traffic lights – and there are plenty more to come.
There’s a great feature Dave added which allows the value of output devices (like LEDs and motors) to be set to whatever the current value of an input device is, automatically, without having to poll in a loop. The following example allows the RGB values of an LED to be determined by three potentiometers for colour mixing:
from gpiozero import RGBLED, MCP3008
from signal import pause
led = RGBLED(red=2, green=3, blue=4)
red_pot = MCP3008(channel=0)
green_pot = MCP3008(channel=1)
blue_pot = MCP3008(channel=2)
led.red.source = red_pot.values
led.green.source = green_pot.values
led.blue.source = blue_pot.values
pause()Other wacky ways to set the brightness of an LED: from a Google spreadsheet – or according to the number of instances of the word “pies” on the BBC News homepage!
Alex Eames gave it a test drive and made a video of a security light project using a relay – coded in just 16 lines of code.
GPIO Zero Security Light in 16 lines of code
Using GPIO Zero Beta to make a security light in 16 lines of code. See blog article here… http://raspi.tv/?p=8609 If you like the look of the RasPiO Portsplus port labels board I’m using to identify the ports, you can find that here http://rasp.io/portsplus
Yasmin Bey created a robot controlled by a Wii remote:
Yasmin Bey on Twitter
@ben_nuttall @RyanteckLTD pic.twitter.com/JEoSUlHtF6
Version 1.0 is out now so the API will not change – but we will continue to add components and additional features. GPIO Zero is now pre-installed in the new Raspbian Jessie image available on the downloads page. You can also install it now by entering the following commands into a terminal:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install python3-gpiozero python-gpiozeroRemember – since the release of Raspbian Jessie, you no longer need to run GPIO programs with sudo – so you can just run these programs directly from IDLE or the Python shell. GPIO Zero supports both Python 2 and Python 3. Python 3 is recommended!
Let me know your suggestions for additional components and interfaces in the comments below – and use the hashtag #gpiozero to share your project code and photos!
A huge thanks goes to Ben Croston, whose excellent RPi.GPIO library sits at the foundation of everything in GPIO Zero, and to Dave Jones whose contributions have made this new library quite special.
See the GPIO Zero documentation and recipes and check out the Getting Started with GPIO Zero resource – more coming soon.
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