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Digital I/O

Overview⚓︎

Digital I/O is handled by the Linux GPIO subsystem. This is a generic interface that organizes the GPIO pins by the hardware chips that input or output digital signals. The interface is generic and presents a large number of inputs and outputs in the system, mostly internal.

Platform specific⚓︎

HMX

MX-V

mx4

Geting started⚓︎

Where possible, it is recommended to use the modern (since Linux v4.8) GPIO API. It is implemented in libgpiod and comes with bindings also for C++ and Python.

The library comes with a set of tools that can be used from a shell script to set and get values.

  • gpiodetect - list all gpiochips present on the system, their names, labels and number of GPIO lines
  • gpioinfo - list all lines of specified gpiochips, their names, consumers, direction, active state and additional flags
  • gpioget - read values of specified GPIO lines
  • gpioset - set values of specified GPIO lines, potentially keep the lines exported and wait until timeout, user input or signal
  • gpiofind - find the gpiochip name and line offset given the line name
  • gpiomon - wait for events on GPIO lines, specify which events to watch, how many events to process before exiting or if the events should be reported to the console