GPIO Tutorial for Raspberry Pi Part 1 - Setting up

Key Takeaways

All right. Hello everybody and welcome to another Raspberry Pi tutorial video. In this video, I'm going to be showing you guys how to make a basic um circuit and also use your GPIO pins on your Raspberry Pi. So, just a little bit of information before we get into it of what we're going to need and what we're actually looking at. For one, on our actual Pi here, um, our GPIO pins are these pins here. There's 26 of them. Though, you can't actually use every single one of them. Uh, what I do suggest is you look up a um, basically a diagram online and, uh, and see which what the pin which of the pins do what and so on. I believe there's eight total pins that we can actually use for input output. And then there are some pins that honestly I don't know enough about the Pi or computers to know why they're even there, but there are some pins that you're not to plug into like ever. So, I don't know why they're even there, but anyway, they are there. And so, just be really careful with some of the ones that you plug into. Um, so anyway, we'll just go ahead and get started. the there are a couple pins or like the uh whenever you're looking at a diagram, it's assuming that you're oriented like this and it's the top right um is where the GPIO uh pins are located on the board. So whenever you see a diagram that's how it's ordered and the pins go like one two three four five and so on. And then the other thing to keep in mind is the GPIO actual like label of the pin is a little different than the actual pin's label. And there so when you're programming you need to like by default it's actually going by the name of the pin not pin's number but you can also program in um to your you know your your Python program to say actually we're going to use pin number whatever. But for now, what we're going to do is actually call the pin by its, you know, program name. So anyway, that's the board. I'm going to move it out of the way now. Uh, a few other things that you're going to need. I did kind of warn you in a previous video, but if you don't have these things, you can, I guess, still watch the video, but you should definitely get your hands on some is a breadboard. This is a cheap breadboard. Um, and you can really get a breadboard and like all kinds of fun stuff um on like eBay or something like that. just type in like breadboard kit and you get just a bunch of stuff. Um, but the next few things that you're going to need is at least for this tutorial is an LED light, which I already have. I just got this little tiny LED light. And you'll need a proper resistor uh for the LED light. Now, um if you don't if you do know like the forward um the forward voltage and such of your LED light, you can just do the math and figure out what resistor you need. But naturally, I mean, you you will need a resistor because you're pushing uh 3.3 volts out of your uh Raspberry Pi um out of I believe it's the top left for the uh 3.3 volts. Um you're pushing that out. And so if you plug that directly into this LED, it'll probably shine for like a few seconds and then it'll just burn out. So you're going to need a proper resistor for that. And for that, you'll just have to do the math because um each LED is going to be a little different. So anyway, for example, this one's like a little tiny LED. Most people have like these Mondo LEDs. So this one requires a little bit more resistance than most. Most of them are probably going to require something in like the under 100 uh ohms resistance. Uh this one, this is a 220 and um the LED uh flash is pretty bright. If you don't know though, like I didn't have any documentation on this. If you don't know, then what you can do is just like start really high and then work your way down until you can um start to see it blinking. It'll be like really dim probably at first and then just go until it's bright enough. Um so anyway, you'll need that. And then finally, last thing that you'll need is a little bit trickier to find than most of this stuff is male to female jumper cables. It has to be male to female because um most jumper cables are male to male, right? Like this is the male end and like this is female because you can, you know, insert into it where all the GPIO here is is male. So you have to have a female um cable. So, keep that in mind when you're buying like a breadboard kit. You'll probably have to buy these separately unless you go for like an Arduino kit or something like that or even a Raspberry Pi kit. Um, then it'll have like the male to female um cables. But really, the whole kit should cost like $15. Like, don't pay for anything more than that. So, um anyway, we'll need those, the resistor, LED, and obviously your board. And now what we're going to do is pop over to our uh Raspberry Pi and begin um getting the things that we need for the GPIO and then also programming our um our simple program for GPIO. So let's get started.