gpio

An Erlang application for interfacing with GPIOs on Linux systems.

This GPIO application allows for reading and writing to GPIO pins as well as monitoring input GPIO pins.

Setup

You need to add gpio as a dependency to your project. If you are using rebar3, you can add the following to your rebar.config:

{deps, [
    {gpio, "0.6.3"}
]}.

Also ensure that gpio is added as a dependency to your application, by updating your .app.src file:

{application, my_app, [

    {applications, [
        kernel,
        stdlib,

        gpio  % <- You need this in your applications list
    ]}
]}.

Usage

Opening the gpio chip

The following will open gpiochip2 (typically called GPIO3):

> {ok, Chip} = gpio:open_chip("/dev/gpiochip2").
{ok, #Ref<0.3061467712.2848194561.68326>}

Once the chip is open you need to either use gpio:open_lines/5 if you want to read/write values to/from the lines, or gpio:open_line_events/5 if you want to monitor a line.

Opening gpio lines

The following will open a single line IO1 from the previously open chip (typically this would be GPIO3_IO1). The opened line is configured as an output with a default value of 0. The last parameter is used to communicate to the kernel a description of the chip use. If debugfs is enabled, this information is visible in /sys/kernel/debug/gpio.

> {ok, SingleLine} = gpio:open_lines(Chip, [1], [output], [0], "my-application").
{ok, #Ref<0.3061467712.2848194561.68334>}

To write a 0 to the GPIO line, you can use:

ok = gpio:write_lines(SingleLine, {0}).

Alternatively, to write a 1 to the GPIO line, you can use:

ok = gpio:write_lines(SingleLine, {1}).

The gpio:write_lines/2 function takes a tuple of 0 and 1 values. The arity of this tuple must be equal to the width of the lines. Previously, we opened a single line, which is why we use a single element tuple. If instead, we opened 2 lines, we would need to provide a 2 element tuple like below:

> {ok, MultiLines} = gpio:open_lines(Chip, [1, 2, 5], [output], [0, 0, 0], "my-application").
{ok, #Ref<0.3061467712.2848194561.68339>}
> ok = gpio:write_lines(MultiLines, {1, 1, 1}). % Set all pins to 1
ok
> ok = gpio:write_lines(MultiLines, {1, 0, 1}). % Set IO1 and IO5 to 1, IO2 is set to 0
ok

Monitoring line events

The following will monitor the pin IO10 (GPIO3_I10) for rising values (changes from 0 to 1).

> {ok, LineEvents} = gpio:open_line_events(Chip, 10, [], [rising_edge], "my-application").
{ok, {#Ref<0.3061467712.2848194561.68344>, <0.340.0>}}

The monitoring process will then receive messages like the following:

{gpio, LineEvents, {event, Timestamp, Type}}

Where Timestamp is a system timestamp in nanosecond, and Type is either rising_edge or falling_edge.

In case of an error, the process might receive a message like the following:

{gpio, LineEvents, {error, Error}}