Raspberry Pi Zero: Blink an LED using GPIO pins

Want to use the GPIO pins to blink an LED using a Raspberry Pi Zero? Here’s a quick guide to get you started.

Build the circuit

Do this is the Raspberry Pi off. You don’t want to accidentally touch the wrong pin on the Pi and fry the Pi.

Use http://pinout.xyz to check the pinouts of the Raspberry Pi.

Create a circuit that goes from GND to LED to resistor to GPIO pin (BCM).

Install the Python Library

We’ll be using python to build our program so first download the python library. There is an api to interface with the GPIO pins which makes this a lot easier.

sudo apt-get install python3-gpiozero python-gpiozero

https://gpiozero.readthedocs.io/ for more information on this library.

Create the Program

Now create a file called blink.py and put the following in it:

from gpiozero import LED
from time import sleep

led = LED(17) # Choose the correct pin number

while True:
    led.on()
    sleep(1)
    led.off()
    sleep(1)