webled - a web-enabled light emitting diode

There are different styles of hello-world applications. Some just spit out to whatever output is provided the Hello, world! message, some read a digital input and react to it and some just toggle an LED. This one is the of the latter kind, using Raspberry Pi and a green LED.

Disclaimer

I am not responsible for any damage you might cause to your hardware. Use at your own risk.

The setup

It's really straight forward to wire everything up. You start by connecting PIN01 through a resistor (let's say 100Ohm) to anode (the longer lead) and then the cathode (the shorter lead) to PIN40. That's it.

Now we need a web application to work with that new high-end device of ours. We start by installing Flask - a Sinatra-inspired framework for Python.

pi@raspberrypi:~ $ sudo pip install flask

Code

That will take a while (~ a minute) and after it is done we finally get to do some coding.

The code is pretty straightforward. First we import flask and jsonify for later use, then we create a Flask application instance, map the root to hello function which when executed toggles the state and stores the new value to PIN40. In the initialization block first we setup the GPIO.BOARD mode to be able to refer to the pins as they are on the board (as opposed to the GPIO.BCM mode which refers to the CPU pins), set the PIN40 mode to GPIO.OUTPUT to be able to switch our device on and off, and initialize the initial state of that pin. When the application finishes we clean things up so that others can use the library.

The host = '0.0.0.0' makes it possible to access the application from other hosts as opposed to host = '127.0.0.1' (which is the default) which would only allow access from the board.

Test drive

To test drive it open up a web browser and navigate to the http://localhost:5000 URL and observe the LED to light up. When you refresh the page it will go dark again. And so on and so forth. Such is the purpose of a web-enabled LED (a webled)

Happy hacking!