At this stage of the (pastry) game, in this series we have looked at a lot of digital signals, GPIO, Serial UART, SPI and I2C, as well as some analog signals (via SPI), so where next? This time we’ll be adding PWM functionality to our Raspberry Pi.
 
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We can use the hardware PWM0 to dim an LED. To demonstrate LED dimming via PWM control we’ll use a 330-Ω resistor and an LED connected between PWM0 (GPIO18/pin 12) and ground. At this point we would be firing up Python and making the RPi.GPIO low-level library do some interesting things, but surprisingly RPi.GPIO doesn’t have a method to access the hardware PWM0. So, instead to demonstrate hardware PWM functionality we’ll install wiringPi written by Gordon Henderson [1].