A Light Emitting Diode (or LED) is a small electronic component that gives off light when a current is passed through it. LEDs come in many shapes, sizes and colors. Some even have colors that can be varied depending on how they are controlled (such as the RGB LED in your kit).

LED Polarity

First, a word on LED polarity. Some electronics components (including LEDs) are polarized, meaning the direction a component is connected in matters. LEDs have a short leg and a long leg (or a flat side and a round side). The long side (or round side of the plastic shell) should always be connected to the point in the circuit with higher voltage (i.e. higher potential). This will allow current to flow through the LED in the proper direction.

LED Breadboard Layout

The LED should be connected to GPIO Pin 18 as shown in the below diagram. A 220 Ohm resistor is used to limit the current through the LED to 5 mA. A smaller resistor(or none) would allow too much current through the LED and the Raspberry Pi's GPIO port, potentially damaging the port and the LED.

Why a 220 Ohm resistor?

The resistor is needed to dissipate extra electrical energy (voltage) coming from the Raspberry Pi. The Pi's digital outputs run at 3.3V and most LEDs have a forward voltage of about 2.2 Volts. The voltage supply (3.3V) always equals the voltage load (LED + Resistor), our resistor will have a drop of 1.1V across it. We must also keep in mind the current drawn from the Raspberry Pi's output pin. The Raspberry Pi can only source up to 5mA of current, meaning we must choose our resistor to limit the current to less than 5mA at 1.1V. The current through the LED is determined by an equation known as Ohms Law. It takes the form V=IR, where V is the voltage drop across the resistor, I is the current through the resistor and R is the resistance. Using Ohm's Law, we can determine the proper resistance to use is 220 Ohms.

V=IR
1.1V = .005A * R
R=220 Ohms

Software Control of the GPIO Port

For the Raspberry Pi to turn the LED on and off, we must be able to control the attached GPIO pin. In the schematic above, this is GPIO pin 18, using Broadcom(GPIO.BCM) numbering. To turn pin 18 on or off from a Python script, complete the following steps:

• Import the GPIO library

 import RPi.GPIO as GPIO 

• Set the GPIO library into Broadcom pin numbering mode

 GPIO.setmode(GPIO.BCM) 

• Set the pin as an output

 GPIO.setup(18, GPIO.OUT, initial=GPIO.LOW) 

• Set the pin to high or low

 GPIO.output(18, GPIO.HIGH) 

• Cleanup when done

 GPIO.cleanup()