Adventures with Raspberry Pi: RGB Led Take 2

Once upon a time I tried to do software PWM to set different colors in a RGB Led. It failed.

LEDs are generally either on or off, with no intermediate states - so to get LED at half the intensity, you just turn it fully on for half the time, and blink it fast enough that human eye won't be able to tell the difference.

The problem was that the blinking wasn't fast enough. So now it's time for the long overdue debugging.

First, what the hell is the gem doing? Apparently it's simply writing to files like /sys/class/gpio/gpio17/value. So what if we just write to this file in a loop, skipping the gem? It turns out that's also just not fast enough.

So fallback plan, let's get wiringPi library (git clone git://git.drogon.net/wiringPi) and write it in C:

#include <stdio.h>
#include <wiringPi.h>

int main(int argc, char **argv)
{
  int r = atoi(argv[1]);
  int g = atoi(argv[2]);
  int b = atoi(argv[3]);
  int i;

  printf("Raspberry RGB %d %d %d blink\n", r, g, b);

  if (wiringPiSetup () == -1)
    return 1;

  pinMode(0, OUTPUT); // R
  pinMode(2, OUTPUT); // G
  pinMode(3, OUTPUT); // B

  for (;;)
  {
    digitalWrite(0, rand() % 256 <= r);
    digitalWrite(2, rand() % 256 <= g);
    digitalWrite(3, rand() % 256 <= b);
  }
  return 0;
}

Then compile with gcc -o rgbled rgbled.c -lwiringPi, and run like sudo ./rgbled 255 127 0
And it works!

Now obviously I don't want to write C programs for every trivial thing, so next step would presumably be using ffi interface to wiringPi instead of what PiPiper does with file-based interface.