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Turning on an LED with your Raspberry Pi

B.tech Computer Science Engineering (Guru Nanak Dev University)

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Turning on an LED with your Raspberry Pi's GPIO Pins

We need the following to set up the raspberry Pi

• A Breadboard
• An LED
• A 330 ohm resistor
• 2x Male to Female jumper wires

The Breadboard
The breadboard is a convenient way to connect electronic
components to each other without having to solder them
together.

They are often used to test ("prototype") a circuit design before

making a final version of a project, whether that be soldering
wires together or creating a Printed Circuit Board (PCB).

The holes on the breadboard are connected as follows:

With the breadboard, the top row of holes are all connected
together, marked with a red line.

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And so are the second row of holes, marked with a blue line.
The same goes for the matching two blue/red rows of holes at the
bottom of the breadboard.
In the middle, the columns of holes are connected together with
a break in the middle (which comes in handy if you straddle a chip
or similar component across the two sides, allowing you to
connect to both sides of a chip with wires, without the chip's legs
connecting together)

The LED

When you pick up the LED, you will notice that one leg is
longer than the other.

The longer leg (known as the ‘anode’), is always connected to

the positive supply of the circuit.
The shorter leg (known as the ‘cathode’) is connected to the
negative side of the power supply, known as ‘ground’.
LED stands for Light Emitting Diode, and glows when electricity
(current) is passed through it.

LEDs will only work if power is supplied the correct way round (i.e.
if the ‘polarity’ is correct).

You will not break the LEDs if you connect them the wrong way
round, they will just not light.

If you find that they do not light in your circuit, it may be because
they have been connected the wrong way round.

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The Resistor

You must ALWAYS use resistors to connect LEDs up to the

GPIO pins of the Raspberry Pi.
The Raspberry Pi GPIO pins can only supply a small current
(about 60mA).
The LEDs will want to draw more, and if allowed to they may
damage your Raspberry Pi or the pins used.
Therefore adding resistors to the circuit will ensure that only this
small amount of current will flow.
Resistors are a way of limiting the amount of electricity going
through a circuit; specifically, they limit the amount of ‘current’
that is allowed to flow. The measure of resistance is called
the Ohm (Ω), and the larger the resistance, the more it limits the
current.
The value of a resistor is marked with coloured bands along the
length of the resistor body.
You will be using a 330Ω resistor.
You can identify the 330Ω resistors by the colour bands along the
body. The colour coding will depend on how many bands are on
the resistors supplied:
• If there are four colour bands, they will be
Orange, Orange, Brown, and then Gold.
• If there are five bands, then the colours will be Orange,
Orange, Black, Black, Brown.
It does not matter which way round you connect the resistors.
Current flows in both ways through them.

Jumper Wires

Jumper wires are used on breadboards to ‘jump’

from one connection to another.

The ones you will be using in this circuit have different connectors
on each end. The end with the ‘pin’ will go into the Breadboard.

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The end with the piece of plastic with a hole in it will go onto the
Raspberry Pi’s GPIO pins.

The Raspberry Pi GPIO Pins

GPIO stands for General Purpose Input Output. It's a way the
Raspberry Pi can control and monitor the outside world by being
connected to electronic circuits.
The Raspberry Pi is able to control LEDs, turning them on or off, or
motors, or many other things using these pins (this is known as
an 'output').
It is also able to detect whether things like a switch has been
pressed, or temperature, light and more (this is know an an
'input').

Learn how to control LEDs and a buzzer, and detect when a

button has been pressed.

The diagram below left shows the pin layout for the older 26-pin
Raspberry Pi Models which are no longer sold.

The latest 40-pin Raspberry Pi’s share the same layout of pins for
the top 13 rows as the old model.

Building the Circuit

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The circuit consists of a power supply (the Raspberry Pi), an LED

that lights when the power is applied, and a resistor to limit the
current that can flow through the circuit:
• You will be using one of the ‘ground’ (GND) pins to act
like the ‘negative’ or 0 volt ends of a battery.
• The ‘positive’ end of the battery will be provided by a
GPIO pin. Here we will be using pin GPIO18 (which
is physical pin 12).
• When these pins are ‘taken high’, which means it outputs
3.3 volts, the LED will light.
Now take a look at the circuit diagram below:

You should turn your Raspberry Pi off for the next bit, just in case
you accidentally short something out.
• Use one of the jumper wires to connect a ground pin to the
rail, marked with blue, on the breadboard. The female end
goes on the Raspberry Pi's pin, and the male end goes into
a hole on the breadboard.
• Then connect the resistor from the same row on the
breadboard to a column on the breadboard, as
shown above.
• Next, push the LEDs legs into the breadboard, with the
long leg (with the kink) on the right.
• Lastly, complete the circuit by connecting the right hand
leg of the LED to GPIO18. This is shown here with the blue
wire.

The Code

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You are now ready to write some code to switch the LED on. Turn
on your Raspberry Pi and open the terminal window.

Create a new text file “LED.py” by typing the following:

nano LED.py

Type or copy over the following code:

import RPi.GPIO as GPIO

import time
GPIO.setmode(GPIO.BCM)
GPIO.setwarnings(False)
GPIO.setup(18,GPIO.OUT)
print "LED on"
GPIO.output(18,GPIO.HIGH)
time.sleep(1)
print "LED off"
GPIO.output(18,GPIO.LOW)

Once you have added all the code and checked it, save and
exit the text editor with “Ctrl + x” then “y” then “enter”.

Running the Code

To run this code type:

sudo python LED.py

You will see the LED turn on for a second and then turn off.

If your code does not run and an error is reported, edit the code
again using nano LED.py.

Explanation
So, what is happening in the code? Let’s go through it a line at a
time:

import RPi.GPIO as GPIO

The first line tells the Python interpreter (the thing that runs the
Python code) that it will be using a ‘library’ that will tell it how to
work with the Raspberry Pi’s GPIO pins.

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A ‘library’ gives a programming language extra commands

that can be used to do something different that it previously
did not know how to do.
This is like adding a new channel to your TV so you can
watch something different.

import time

Imports the Time library so that we can pause the script later on.
GPIO.setmode(GPIO.BCM)

Each pin on the Raspberry Pi has several different names, so you

need to tell the program which naming convention is to be used.
print "LED on"

This line prints some information to the terminal.

GPIO.output(18,GPIO.HIGH)

This turns the GPIO pin ‘on’. What this actually means is that the
pin is made to provide power of 3.3volts. This is enough to turn
the LED in our circuit on.

time.sleep(1)

Pauses the Python program for 1 second

print "LED off"

This line prints some information to the terminal.

GPIO.output(18,GPIO.LOW)

This turns the GPIO pin ‘off’, meaning that the pin is no longer
supplying any power.
And that's it! You are now able to turn an LED on and off

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