Lighting LEDs on the Raspberry Pi with Python

There are many tutorials available for this already, but I just wanted to collect my observations into a series of steps that I can repeat later.

For reference, I used raspberry-gpio-python, Raspberry Leaf, and How to use your Raspberry Pi like an Arduino.

I connected an LED and an inline resistor to GPIO pin 7 and ground, one side of a momentary pushbutton to ground, and the other side of the pushbutton to a 1 kOhm resistor connected to 3.3 V.

Starting from a fresh install of Raspbian, at the command line (or in LXTerminal) input the following -commands: (edit: the crossed-out commands aren't really necessary)

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install python

sudo apt-get install python-dev

sudo curl -O http://python-distribute.org/distribute_setup.py

sudo python distribute_setup.py

sudo easy_install pip

sudo apt-get install python-rpi.gpio

sudo python

#!/usr/bin/env python

from time import sleep

import os

import RPi.GPIO as GPIO

GPIO.setmode(GPIO.BCM)

# define the pins we're using

button1 = 4

LED = 7

# set up the pins

GPIO.setup(button1, GPIO.IN)

GPIO.setup(LED, GPIO.OUT)

# turn on the LED

GPIO.output(LED, True)

# wait for half a second

sleep(0.5)

# turn off the LED

GPIO.output(LED, False)

# toggle the LED

GPIO.output(LED, not GPIO.input(4))

# set up some variable to read from the button

input = False

previousInput = True

# loop

while True:

 # read the button state to the variable input

 input = GPIO.input(button1)

 # make sure the button state isn't what it used to be

 if ((not previousInput) and input):

  print("button pushed")

 # copy the button state to the previousInput variable

 previousInput = input

 # wait to "debounce" the input

 sleep(0.05)

# clean things up

GPIO.cleanup()