Raspberry Pi GPIO Tutorial: The Basics Explained

This Raspberry Pi GIO tutorial takes you through a lot of the basics of the GPIO pins and what you can do with them

As you may know the general purpose input and output pins (GPIO) are used to communicate with other circuity. This includes thing such as extension boars, circuits, and much more. You can do some pretty cool stuff with them.

You should beware that playing around with the Raspberry Pi GPIO pins wrongly can result in destroying the Pi. The best way to avoid this is to double check that whatever you’re plugging in will be supported by the Pi.

In the little small circuit, I use in the Raspberry Pi GPIO tutorial I use the following equipment.

• 1 100-ohm resistor
• 1x Red LED
• GPIO Breakout Kit Assembled
• Breadboard
• Breadboard Wire/Jumper Cables

There is quite a bit of terminology around these pins but be sure to not let this turn you off from using them. We go into the terminology a little in the video but if you need more information be sure to look up some of the terms I used.

In the video we display a Raspberry Pi GPIO pinout diagram. If you would like this to use for future reference, then be sure head over the guide. You can find the link above.

We will be looking at doing many projects using the GPIO pins in the future. This includes stuff such as home automation! This is something I know a lot of people have been asking about.

I hope you have enjoyed this video on the Raspberry Pi GPIO pins. If you have any questions, feedback or anything else feel free to drop us a comment below. Also be sure to subscribe so you can stay up to date with all our latest Raspberry Pi projects, guides and much more.

[world]

Just a reminder, to activate I2C you have to go under Interfacing Options in the latest versions of Raspian.

[antonnym]

THANK YOU. Very nicely presented for a beginner like me. I'm old-school software (Z-80 and 8080 Assembly), so this is nice for me to see how to use the breadboard. Too many of the videos assume I know something about that! You did great. I subscribed immediately.

[programmerxix]

“A good video you have “
-In My Yoda Voice

[danielc]

Great video and explanation. Keep it up! I noticed a lot of people whining about your voice. Pay them no heed. The voice does sound somewhat unusual, but it doesn't affect the clarity of the content. I clicked this video to learn, not to be entertained.

[halsvk]

I thought only 3v3 and 5v pins provide power and GPIO pins only close or open the circuit (like relay) or read signals. I am confused. Why you not need external power source to turn this LED on with pin 7 (GPIO 4)?

[niler]

Thank you for this, The beginning - information about the different type of I/O was really helpful!!

[josephkreifelsii]

3:37 neat, I was able to set up the pi to stop auto logging in on bootup. I always wondered about that because in CENTOS and Redhat systems I've used, there has always been either a login prompt (non-gui), or log in screen (gnome desktop).

[CicieWang-igkh]

great video. having worked at Broadcom in my early career on the chips on that went on earlier generations of raspberry pi, I found the video very helpful to get my son started on his programming journey. One thing I noticed is that, you used GPIO4, but you programmed GPIO7 in your code. It is indeed GPIO4 that's being programmed. How come there is this discrepancy in GPIOs, what exactly is the mapping of GPIOs for raspberry 4?

[austinmorgan]

Great video man! Helped out a lot for a noob.

[idolkidd]

This was great. To the point and very helpful. Thanks!!

[ghost-xh]

Awesome bringing GPIO to my channel slowly but surely I love what you can do with these devices it is so mind blowing I love it so much !!!

[taotechnique]

Great video. I am new to the world of Pi, and your video really helped me navigate this board. Thank you for taking the time to make this video

[james_neko]

You shouldn't need sudo just to write your led_blink script. This'll just mean only root can access it. Do it as your regular `pi` user.

[yoshiyolo]

tx that video was very helpful im a so so coder and i didnt even now what they did till now

[VeryMuchBlessed]

Very good and helpful presentation. Thanks much.

Can I program the pins it on my laptop offline and then once finished put the program on pi?

[JohnWaynea]

Can I use the ribbon cable to connect a 3.5" display instead of connecting it directly to the gpio pins?

[waynefilkins]

Do they have a ribbon cable for connecting it to a motor shield instead of stacking the shield on top?

[marcello]

8:05 why do we need to gain higher privileges to let a led blink?

[DrCognitive]

One thing I can't seem to get an answer to is, if I want to power a small audio amplifier off the Raspberry Pi's GPIO, specifically what pins do I use? The device if 5v and has a hot wire and ground connector. Do I have to somehow splice this to the two 5v pins and one to a ground pin or can I use a two pin female JST cable on the one 5v and one ground pin that are next to each other? I've been searching the internet for two days trying to find an answer to this when I stumbled across this video.