Trying Laravel Pinout

At Laravel Live last year, I got to watch a talk by Dan Johnson who showed his incredible package, Pinout. Laravel Pinout allows you to control hardware via a Laravel application and I knew as soon as the talk finished, I'd have to try it out!

I ended up having Christmas off last year and needed a project to work on so it seemed like the perfect opportunity to get a breadboard, some LED displays a raspberry pi and lots of wires and tinker around with it!

It actually took a lot of effort to get working 😂 and I do plan on submitting a Pull Request with some changes to make to libgpiod so that Pinout supports the latest version of the drivers, but I was determined to push through so I had something!

Eventually, after spending most of Christmas Day and Boxing Day tinkering, I finally had an LED lit up that I could control via a Laravel Application!

My wiring definitely needs improving as it's pretty messy! I also want to look into improving the speed between input and output as there's a noticeable delay. I'm unsure whether it's the changes I patched for libgpiod.

Overall, it was a fun package to play around with and I'm sure I'll come back to it later this year when I have some time! My only suggestion would be some documentation on wiring everything together. That's the bit I struggled with being a total newcomer to this.