Working with the Raspberry Pi Gpio can be quite dangerous for your board if you don't follow exactly
the instructions and if you plug a wire in the wrong place.
Note that you don't risk anything for yourself, okay?
The current is way too low to get hurt or to hurt anyone.
The risk here is to kind of fry your board, and after you fry your Raspberry Pi, you won't be able
to use it anymore.
So here are a few important points that you have to follow.
If you carefully follow them, you won't have any problem.
First of all, always power off your Raspberry Pi first when you make a change in the circuit.
Even if it's just to disconnect and reconnect one single cable, can you power off your Raspberry Pi?
You remove the power cable, you make the hardware changes, and then and only then you can power the
Pi again.
Second point is when the Raspberry Pi is powered on with some hardware components.
Don't touch the components with your fingers or try not to do it too much.
You may damage your pi with an electrostatic discharge, also called ESD.
And also this is quite obvious, but don't use any metallic tool to touch the hardware setup when it's
running, for example with a screwdriver.
Okay, only bad things can happen if you do that.
Third point here is that before you power on your Raspberry Pi, double check and even triple check
your hardware setup, even if you are sure about it.
Personally, even if I make the simplest hardware setup and then I'm sure about, I still double check
everything that I do.
Fourth point is when you build a circuit, always start with the ground pins and then make sure that
the ground is common for all your components.
And I'm going to come back to this when we build the circuit.
And finally the Gpio is only support 3.3V.
So don't connect anything that uses five volts directly.
Okay.
You might burn the Gpio pin, not necessarily burn the Raspberry Pi, but you might burn the pin.
And then you can't use that specific pin anymore.
So to recap here, just plugging a wrong cable in the wrong pin can destroy your Pi in a fraction of
seconds, and then you have to buy a new one.
It happened to me in the past and it's not really fun.
Of course, I'm not saying that to scare you.
I just want to make you extra careful with any hardware setup you will do if you follow what I do.
And if you always double check any setup before you boot the Raspberry Pi, then everything will be
okay.
And until you really know what you're doing, I suggest you don't try to improvise with hardware setup.
I will make some explanation videos when I give you instructions to make a new hardware setup, or to
improve the circuit, and I will give you schematics for the activities.
So first watch the videos and then you go step by step from beginning to end by pressing on pause anytime
you need between each instruction.
And look at the image that I provide.
And you will notice that I will often give some extra warnings when dealing with hardware.
And this may seem a bit repetitive, but well, better safe than sorry.
And at the end of the course you will have enough understanding so you can experiment by yourself with
different kinds of setups.
And now that I have said all that, let's start to understand how the breadboard works.