WiringPi is a GPIO access library written in C for the BCM2835 used in the Raspberry Pi.
WiringPi is a PIN based GPIO access library written in C for the BCM2835, BCM2836 and BCM2837 SoC devices used in all Raspberry Pi. versions. The source code is not publicly available but may be made available to those who wish commercial support.
It is designed for use with C and RTB (BASIC) ON THE RASPBERRY PI ONLY.
It’s designed to be familiar to people who have used the Arduino “wiring” system1 and is intended for use by experienced C/C++ programmers. It is not a newbie learning tool.
WiringPi is developed directly on a Raspberry Pi running 32-bit Raspbian.
I do not support any other platform, cross compiling or operating systems. It has been ported to other platforms, other operating systems and some are cross compiling, however I do not maintain those systems. If you are trying to use wiringPi on a platform other than the Raspberry Pi with Raspbian then you must contact the person who did the port and not me.
The original Raspberry Pi Model A and B version B1 was a $35 single board computer with a 26-pin General Purpose Input/Output (GPIO) connector and this carries a set of signals and buses. There are 8 general purpose digital I/O pins – these can be programmed as either digital outputs or inputs. Two of these pins (on 40-pin Pi’s, just one on 26-pin Pi’s) can be designated for hardware PWM output too. Additionally there is a 2-wire I2C interface and a 4-wire SPI interface (with a 2nd select line, making it 5 pins in total) and the serial UART with a further 2 pins.
Over the years there have been some updates:
The I2C, SPI and UART interfaces can also be used as general purpose I/O pins when not being used in their bus modes, giving a grand total of 8 + 2 + 5 + 2 = 17 I/O pins on the P1 connector (plus 4 more on the P5 connector on a Revision 2 Pi) and 28 I/O pins on the B+ and version 2 and 3 boards (Although 2 are reserved for the HAT I2C interface, but can be used as normal GPIOs if not using a HAT board)
WiringPi includes a command-line utility gpio which can be used to program and setup the GPIO pins. You can use this to read and write the pins and even use it to control them from shell scripts.
WiringPi is extendable and modules are provided to extend wiringPi to use analog interface devices on the Gertboard, and to use the popular MCP23x17/MCP23x08 (I2C 7 SPI) GPIO expansion chips, as well as module that will allow blocks of up to 4 74×595 shift registers to be daisy-chained together for an additional 32-bits worth of output as a single unit. (You can have several blocks of 4 74x595s if needed) One of the extension modules allows you to use an ATmega (e.g. Arduino, or the Gertboard) as more GPIO expansion too – via the Pi’s serial port.
Additionally, you can easily write your own extension modules to integrate your own peripheral devices with wiringPi as required.
WiringPi supports analog reading and writing, and while there is no native analog hardware on a Pi by default, modules are provided to support the Gertboards analog chips and other A/D and D/A devices can be implemented relatively easily.
There is a version of wiringPi hosted on Github. Do not use this version of wiringPi. It only exists to facilitate building the Ruby and Python wrappers which have been written by someone else. You may also find other versions of wiringPi on github – these have all been forked and changed to support different hardware platforms. If you use these versions then you MUST contact the person who made that form for support. Requests for support from me will be ignored.
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