GPIO Implementation

By default diozero uses the Linux GPIO Character Device implementation that was added in Linux kernel 4.8. This can be disabled by running with the property diozero.gpio.chardev=false, in which case diozero will revert to the legacy and deprecated sysfs GPIO interface. This property can be set via either the command line (java -Ddiozero.gpio.chardev=false) or as an environment property (export diozero.gpio.chardev=false).

On Debian based systems the gpiod command line tools can be installed using sudo apt install gpiod (gpiodetect, gpioinfo, gpioget, gpioset and gpiomon). These tools can be helpful when troubleshooting.

Note that the board’s Linux kernel has to be at version 4.8 or later to support GPIO Character Device. This page provides a good description of the Linux Kernel user-space GPIO interfaces.

Unfortunately the version of gpiod available in Linux kernels prior to 5.5 does not provide support for pull-up / pull-down resistors. The latest stable kernel version officially available in Debian Buster is 4.19, at the time of diozero 1.0.0, Raspbian and BeagleBone both provide stable 5.4 based Linux Kernels.

To address this, diozero uses its own internal memory mapped GPIO implementation on boards for which it has been implemented and where the current user has access to the corresponding memory file (/dev/gpiomem or /dev/mem) to configure internal GPIO pull-up / pull-down registors.

diozero has memory mapped GPIO support for following boards:

Raspberry Pi (all flavours)
Allwinner R8: Next Think Co CHIP (Allwinner sun4i/sun5i)
Allwinner H3: NanoPi Duo2, NanoPi Neo, …
Allwinner H5: OrangePi Zero Plus
Allwinner H6: OrangePi One Plus
Amlogic S905: Odroid C1/C2
Amlogic S922X: Odroid N2+
Rockchip RK3288: ASUS Tinkerboard
Rockchip RK3399: Radxa Rock 4C+

Memory mapped support for the BeagleBone Green / Black will be added in the near future.

Note that the pigpio provider also supports configuring the pull-up / pull-down resistors on the Raspberry Pi.