The primary software to make particular use of the RP1 “southbridge” chip on the Raspberry Pi 5 has appeared, courtesy of Pimoroni software program developer Philip Howard: a textual content person interface (TUI) device for monitoring pin standing on the general-purpose enter/output (GPIO) header.
Dubbed “rpipins,” the Python software written by Howard is an extension on his earlier pinout.xzy pin-mapping efforts. Slightly than merely present an ASCII-art picture of the Raspberry Pi’s GPIO pins and their functions, although, the brand new device goes a step additional — and gives a stay, automatically-updating view of their state.
rpipins goals to offer a stay view of your Raspberry Pi 5’s GPIO pins’ state on the terminal. (📷: Phil Howard)
The trick behind the device lies within the new RP1 chip, an in-house application-specific built-in circuit (ASIC) developed by Raspberry Pi to deal with the low-speed interfaces on the brand new Raspberry Pi 5 — and which, consequently, decouples the GPIO header from the Broadcom BCM2712 system-on-chip. Howard’s device queries the RP1 straight, one thing not attainable on earlier Raspberry Pi fashions: the software program will run, Howard notes, “however [with] no stay pin states.”
A preview of the device is out there on Howard’s Mastodon account; it may be put in on a Raspberry Pi 5 utilizing pip set up rpipins, although a change in how Python packages are dealt with within the new Debian Bookworm-based Raspberry Pi OS means you may should arrange a Python digital surroundings first.
