Philip Howard's New Tool Gives Raspberry Pi 5 Users a Live Status Report on Their GPIO Pins
Clever little Python tool provides a constantly-updated text-based user interface (TUI) for GPIO pin status, by querying the RP1 chip.
The first application to make specific use of the RP1 "southbridge" chip on the Raspberry Pi 5 has appeared, courtesy of Pimoroni software developer Philip Howard: a text user interface (TUI) tool for monitoring pin status on the general-purpose input/output (GPIO) header.
Dubbed "rpipins," the Python application written by Howard is an extension on his previous pinout.xzy pin-mapping efforts. Rather than simply provide an ASCII-art image of the Raspberry Pi's GPIO pins and their purposes, though, the new tool goes a step further — and provides a live, automatically-updating view of their state.
The trick behind the tool lies in the new RP1 chip, an in-house application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) developed by Raspberry Pi to handle the low-speed interfaces on the new Raspberry Pi 5 — and which, as a result, decouples the GPIO header from the Broadcom BCM2712 system-on-chip. Howard's tool queries the RP1 directly, something not possible on previous Raspberry Pi models: the software will run, Howard notes, "but [with] no live pin states."
A preview of the tool is available on Howard's Mastodon account; it can be installed on a Raspberry Pi 5 using pip install rpipins, though a change in how Python packages are handled in the new Debian Bookworm-based Raspberry Pi OS means you'll have to set up a Python virtual environment first.