Warning:	WiringPi was deprecated by its author in August 2019. As of 31st October 2023 nobody has shown an interest in properly maintaining it. Between this, and changes to GPIO in Rasberry Pi OS Bookworm and on the Raspberry Pi 5, this project is going nowhere. It has been archived to more clearly indicate this status.

Note

This is an unofficial port of Gordon's WiringPi library. Please do not email Gordon if you have issues, he will not be able to help.

For support, comments, questions, etc please join the WiringPi Discord channel: https://discord.gg/SM4WUVG

WiringPi for Python

WiringPi: An implementation of most of the Arduino Wiring functions for the Raspberry Pi.

WiringPi implements new functions for managing IO expanders.

Alternative

• GPIO Zero is another Python library for controlling GPIO. It is installed by default in Raspberry Pi OS and is used in the Raspberry Pi GPIO documentation.

Quick Install

The library is packaged on PyPI and can be installed with pip:

pip install wiringpi

Usage

import wiringpi

# One of the following MUST be called before using IO functions:
wiringpi.wiringPiSetup()      # For sequential pin numbering
# OR
wiringpi.wiringPiSetupSys()   # For /sys/class/gpio with GPIO pin numbering
# OR
wiringpi.wiringPiSetupGpio()  # For GPIO pin numbering

General IO:

wiringpi.pinMode(6, 1)       # Set pin 6 to 1 ( OUTPUT )
wiringpi.digitalWrite(6, 1)  # Write 1 ( HIGH ) to pin 6
wiringpi.digitalRead(6)      # Read pin 6

Setting up a peripheral:

WiringPi supports expanding your range of available "pins" by setting up a port expander. The implementation details of your port expander will be handled transparently, and you can write to the additional pins (starting from PIN_OFFSET >= 64) as if they were normal pins on the Pi.

wiringpi.mcp23017Setup(PIN_OFFSET, I2C_ADDR)

This example was tested on a quick2wire board with one digital IO expansion board connected via I2C:

wiringpi.mcp23017Setup(65, 0x20)
wiringpi.pinMode(65, 1)
wiringpi.digitalWrite(65, 1)

Soft Tone:

Hook a speaker up to your Pi and generate music with softTone. Also useful for generating frequencies for other uses such as modulating A/C.

wiringpi.softToneCreate(PIN)
wiringpi.softToneWrite(PIN, FREQUENCY)

Bit shifting:

wiringpi.shiftOut(1, 2, 0, 123)  # Shift out 123 (b1110110, byte 0-255) to data pin 1, clock pin 2

Serial:

serial = wiringpi.serialOpen('/dev/ttyAMA0', 9600)  # Requires device/baud and returns an ID
wiringpi.serialPuts(serial, "hello")
wiringpi.serialClose(serial)  # Pass in ID

SPI:

The wiringPiSPIDataRW() function needs to be passed a bytes object in Python 3. In Python 2, it takes a string. The following should work in either Python 2 or 3:

wiringpi.wiringPiSPISetup(channel, speed)
buf = bytes([your data here])
retlen, retdata = wiringpi.wiringPiSPIDataRW(0, buf)

Now, retlen will contain the number of bytes received/read by the call. retdata will contain the data itself, and in Python 3, buf will have been modified to contain it as well (that won't happen in Python 2, because then buf is a string, and strings are immutable).

Full details of the API at: http://www.wiringpi.com

Manual Build

Get/setup repo

git clone --recursive https://github.com/WiringPi/WiringPi-Python.git
cd WiringPi-Python

Don't forget the --recursive; it is required to also pull in the WiringPi C code from its own repository.

Prerequisites

To rebuild the bindings you must first have installed swig, python-dev, and python-setuptools (or their python3- equivalents). WiringPi should also be installed system-wide for access to the gpio tool.

sudo apt-get install python-dev python-setuptools swig wiringpi

Build & install with

sudo python setup.py install

Or Python 3:

sudo python3 setup.py install