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We have developed a product based on Raspberry Pi and currently designing the enclosure. To enable users to understand the status of our device we would like to provide two LEDs. These LEDs would blink slow, fast or be solid providing information to the users.

We are looking for ideas or components which will glue to the enclosure and connect to a RPi connector. Has anybody done this before? We looking for ideas on how best to do do this.

One possibility:

  1. Solder the LEDs to the P2 connector on RPi.
  2. Create tunnel columns in the enclosure one per LED. These tunnel open on the surface of enclosure on one end and on the LED on the RPi PCB on the other. Light from the LEDs travels through this tunnel and shows on the surface of the enclosure.
SafetyDevice
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  • maybe a duplicate to this question http://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/questions/697/how-do-i-control-the-system-leds-using-my-software – rob Apr 09 '14 at 10:52
  • @rob since the OP asked for two LEDs to blink, I don't think offering the solution with the OK-LED will be sufficient. I agree, though, that the question does not specifically state he wants to use the GPIO. – LuWi Apr 09 '14 at 13:29
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    The other question goes through (in the various answers) how it is not possible to use the other LEDs. – rob Apr 09 '14 at 13:31

2 Answers2

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You will need to control those leds by yourself since the status led on the raspi are not configurable (at least not in that detail).

You can connect any LED to some port in the GPIO, there are plenty of examples in the internet, like HERE. Then you can glue the LED to your enclose as it is.

For connecting the led to the GPIO you can use simple female headers like those

simple conector cooler connector

javirs
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For purposes like this, the Raspberry Pi coems equipped with the GPIO-Header, which is short for General Purpose Input/Output.

You can very easily connect an LED to this header by using Jumper Wires. The connections you have to make can be seen here, they also use a 270 Ohm Resistor.

The pinout of the connector can be seen here. This example is using the wiringPi program, which can be called in bash (or by using your programming lanugages execute()-function). There are also specific libraries for Python, Java, and some more languages.

To mount the LEDs in the enclosure, take exact measure of the diode. Usually, they are a bit thicker at one end, so if you drill a hole just the size of the top part, it should fit nicely when pushed it from the back. I usually use some hot-glue which also insulates the contacts.

I also suggest the tutorials by Adafruit.

LuWi
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