Core: GPIO support for Core on Appropriate Platforms

[autodidaddict]

It was suggested that I post this here rather than in corefx or coreclr. I am intrigued by the support for Raspberry Pi in the core platform and getting that up and running on the nearest Pi is on my todo list.

What _really_ intrigues me is the ability to access the GPIO system from within a .NET Core application so that I can read from sensors, control LEDs, and send I2C signals to other components chained up with the Pi.

I would love to know if this is supported and what the steps are to get it working.

[autodidaddict]

@petermarcu suggested I create this issue here.

[Petermarcu]

I did some searching and found a few good options from the Mono community that will probably work just fine on .NET Core.

https://github.com/raspberry-sharp/raspberry-sharp-system
https://github.com/AlexSartori/Raspberry-GPIO-Manager
https://github.com/andycb/PiSharp

@eerhardt any advice?

[eerhardt]

For general usage, https://github.com/raspberry-sharp/raspberry-sharp-system was the one I looked into briefly when prototyping/designing my drone/RF24 work.

However, I took a slightly different route. Since I was only concerned about radio signals, I ended up wrapping the native RF24 library in a managed wrapper and used that to talk to the radio. My reasoning was that the RF24 library already had a good API for talking to the radio and I didn't want to rewrite it in managed code over a general purpose GPIO API. I think it worked out well for me, and if there was a native library that already exists and solved my needs, I would take the same approach.

[eerhardt]

That said, I would love to see https://github.com/raspberry-sharp/raspberry-sharp-io ported to .NET Core. 😉

UPDATE: I should have taken 2 seconds to look. Looks like someone already did: https://github.com/ScramOnline/raspberry-sharp-io

[bleroy]

Are we talking about general purpose and unified GPIO APIs (with abstracted support for universal protocols and interfaces such as I2C), that can then be specialized in hardware-specific libraries?

[autodidaddict]

My core need is just to be able to detect pin status and to raise and lower pins. Obviously wrapper libraries above such a core would be useful for specialized tasks. But for now I'd love to be able to demo a microservice running on a Pi that controls an LED and reports the status of a temperature sensor, etc.

[autodidaddict]

In other words, a demo for the maker community indicating that you're not stuck with Python or Node for all the things.

[bleroy]

I like the idea of a blog post with code samples, using one of the available libraries then.

[philcarbone]

We need .NET in this space again! I've used Netduino, and gadgeteer for years, but getting .NET Core with general purpose and unified GPIO APIs would be awesome!

[richlander]

I expect more will happen in this space after .NET Core 2.0 ships.

I'm not seeing anything immediately actionable in this issue. Closing.

[utilitydelta]

I have a library you could use. It's .NET Standard 2.0, you can read/write to GPIO and PWM pins on any linux device.
https://github.com/utilitydelta-io/dotnet-gpio