Look at the Pibrella

The pibrella is a nice little board that connects yo the GPIO connector of your Raspberry PI. It has the folllowing to play around with

Red, Green and yellow LEDs
A push button switch
A buzzer
4 inputs and 4 outputs (protected)
I2C connector (not populated)
ULN2803 chip
Seperate power option

Here is what this board looks like

Pibrella

Lets get started by setting up our PI with whats required, first lets update and upgrade

Source code

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

Now install the python library

Source code

sudo apt-get install python-pip
sudo pip install pibrella

Now in this case we’ll just start the python shell and we will enter our code there for testing

Source code

sudo python -i

Now enter the following code, this will light the LED’s one at a time, nothing fancy.

Source code

import pibrella
pibrella.light.green.on()
pibrella.light.red.on()
pibrella.light.yellow.on()

Once your finished, type in

Source code

quit()

So as you can see for beginners getting started the Pibrella is a perfect little board for learning with. Its relatively low cost, well made and easy to program. I recommend you get your hand son one of these.

Links
PiBrella from Amazon UK