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MTECH_GPIO

A minimal educational GPIO wrapper for Raspberry Pi 3-5, designed for teaching Embedded Systems at Montana Tech.

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Overview

At Montana Tech, introductory Embedded Systems courses (135 and 136) are conducted on Raspberry Pi 4.
While there are several GPIO libraries available for Python – such as RPi.GPIO, pigpio, and PiZero – RPi.GPIO is often the simplest starting point for beginners because it focuses on basic digital electronics concepts without requiring advanced programming techniques.

However, RPi.GPIO is no longer officially supported by the Raspberry Pi Foundation, and its compatibility with newer Raspberry Pi models is limited.
lgpio is now considered one of the most reliable and modern GPIO libraries (it is also used under the hood by gpiozero).

To ease the learning curve for students who have only completed introductory courses (135 and 136), I developed MTECH_GPIO, a lightweight wrapper around lgpio.

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Key Features

• RPi.GPIO-compatible procedural API
  Students familiar with RPi.GPIO can transition seamlessly.

• Unified PWM interface
  PWM is implemented procedurally, not object-oriented, to match the style of RPi.GPIO and simplify usage for beginners.

• Simplified pin modes
  Supports BCM and BOARD numbering modes.

• Input/Output control with built-in pull-up/pull-down support
  Students can quickly configure pins without worrying about low-level lgpio calls.

• Designed for education
  Focused on teaching digital electronics and GPIO concepts, not on advanced software engineering.

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Installation

# Clone this repository
git clone https://github.com/jpach-cs/MTECH_GPIO

# Navigate into the repository
cd MTECH_GPIO

# Install repository
sudo python3 -m pip install .

# Use the library in Python
python3
>>> import MTECH_GPIO as gpio

Example Usage

import MTECH_GPIO as gpio
import time

gpio.setmode(gpio.BCM)

# Setup pin 17 as output
gpio.setup(17, gpio.OUT)

# Simple blinking
for _ in range(5):
    gpio.output(17, gpio.HIGH)
    time.sleep(0.5)
    gpio.output(17, gpio.LOW)
    time.sleep(0.5)

# PWM example
gpio.pwm_start(17, frequency=1000, duty_cycle=50)
time.sleep(2)
gpio.pwm_change_duty(17, 75)
time.sleep(2)
gpio.pwm_change_frequency(17, 500)
time.sleep(2)
gpio.pwm_stop(17)

# Cleanup all pins
gpio.cleanup()

License

MIT License © 2026 Jakub Leszek Pach, Montana Technological University

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

The software is provided "as is", without warranty of any kind. The author is not responsible for any damage or malfunction resulting from its use.