PiBox

In my last post, I completed the "hello world" of digital electronics-- making a single LED blink.  Today we'll be turning it up a notch and controlling 64 separate LEDs.  Ok, there ARE 64 LEDs, but the Pi's GPIO doesn't actually have enough output pins to control that many pins individually.  What's a hardware hacker to do??  

I know I promised to blog some more about how I set this blog up, but I've been too excited to to get playing with the GPIO (General Purpose Output) pins on my Pi.  The input/output pins are what make the Pi really similar to my Arduino. They're the glue that allow hardware and software to really meet.  Except on my Arduino, I must use C that's compiled to machine code and loaded onto a basic microcontroller.  My Pi runs an actual operating system, so I can use whatever high-level language I fancy and bring whatever syntax and productivity I want along for the ride.