In this chapter we will explore the next piece of the Raspberry Pi's hardware, the GPIO pins.
GPIO stands for general purpose input/output. The pins can be used to connect external electronic devices to the Raspberry Pi. This also allows us to build our own circuits and control them using software we have written in languages such as C, Assembly, and Python.
In this chapter we will cover:
An introduction to the GPIO pins
Creating simple electronic devices that run off the pins
Writing Python applications that interact with the pins
We will start by walking through the GPIO pins and looking at what each type is.