This chapter covers the basics of the hardware world of the Banana Pi. Just like the Raspberry Pi and the Arduino, the Banana Pi is able to interact with external electrical components. To achieve this, we are going to use the GPIO (General-Purpose input/output) pins that are introduced in this chapter.

We will switch on an LED using the shell and with a small application that we are programming. Furthermore, we will build a circuit, including a pull-down resistor and control an LED with a button. To achieve this, we will introduce the C programming language with the WiringPi library and the Python scripting language with the RPi.GPIO library.