Raspberry Pi Linux User Mode GPIO in Python

In this article I am going to discuss an alternative approach to using GPIO on a Raspberry Pi in Python to that taken by an early version the RPi.GPIO package[1]. The approach occurred to me in 2012 while making a start at hardware interfacing and programming using a Raspberry Pi with some LEDs, switches and the like that had been collecting dust for 20 to 30 years. To read and write data to the GPIO lines I thought I would start with Python and the RPi.