Microcontroller GPIO

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A general-purpose input/output (GPIO) is a digital signal pin on an integrated circuit or electronic circuit board(In our case, a microcontroller or arduino board) whose behavior—including whether it acts an input or output—is controllable by the user.

GPIOs have no predefined purpose and are unused by default. If used, the purpose and behavior of a GPIO is defined by the user or the developer. These pins basically act as bridges to interface with the outside world. For instance, a LED can be connected to these pins as an output device or a sensor can be connected to GPIO for obtaining some input which can be processed by the microcontroller. However, these pins should be made available by the board manufacturer so that they can be used by developers and prototypers.


Arduino also has many GPIO pins available for users to program and interface. The pin number and location can be found on multiple diagrams available on the internet. You can see the different pins as well as the pin header which provides us access to these pins. It is very important to know the location of the GPIO and the pin number. For instance, on the arduino board, we can see pins marked as 13,12,GND etc. The 13,12 pins are GPIO pins while the GND pin is the Ground pin. The pins and their numbering becomes clear from the image given below:




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