📌 Pinned Pinned is a GPIO pin control and webcam streaming interface for Raspberry Pi 4/5. No auth or built in security, just a simple server you run on your Pi, then access from a browser on the same local network. Features Instant GPIO Control: View and toggle GPIO directions (Input/Output), pull resistors, and logic states directly from the web interface. MJPEG Camera Streaming: Plug in a USB webcam or any camera exposed at /dev/video0 and it natively streams into the dashboard. That includes Pi Camera setups too, as long as they show up there. Multiplayer & Scriptable: Programmatically control pins from Python, Node, or any other language via the WebSocket API. It keeps the hardware, your scripts, and all web dashboards synchronized in real-time!

Quick Start

Prerequisites

• Raspberry Pi / any arm64 or x86_64 machine (for testing)
• Linux (any systemd based, Trixie is tested)
• A USB webcam or Pi Camera (optional)

Permissions
Add your user to the video and gpio groups for hardware access:

sudo usermod -a -G video,gpio $USER

Log out and back in (or just restart) for permissions to take effect!

Install

curl -fsSL https://cd.pinned.shdata.net/install.sh | sh

Then open http://<Pi Local IP>:7727 in your browser.

Uninstall

pinned uninstall

External Camera URL

Using a webcam plugged into the Pi is convenient, but she chews through data. Unfortunately most webcams don't emit H.264 and a Pi cannot recode in real-time lmao. So as a backup for cases where you need to reduce bandwidth, you can point Pinned at an external camera page/stream from another machine on your network with magic H.264 powers.

Pinned itself is not doing WebRTC here, it just embeds whatever URL you paste into External Camera URL. OBS + MediaMTX is a simple, flexible, low latency option. Here's a crash course:

1. Download and run MediaMTX on your main PC (it's a tiny, single-file server).
2. For resolution, bitrate, and fps, a sweet spot is 1280x720, 2000kbps, and 30fps (this might come after the next step for you).
3. Go to OBS -> Settings -> Stream.
   • Service: Custom
   • Server: rtmp://localhost:1935/live
   • Stream Key: webcam
4. Open OBS -> Settings -> Output. Change Output Mode to Advanced. Find your Video Encoder settings and make sure Profile is baseline and x264 options has bframes=0. WebRTC requires 0 B-frames for real-time streaming.
5. Click Start Streaming in OBS.
6. Open your Pinned dashboard settings, and paste the MediaMTX page it just built for you into the External Camera URL: http://<YOUR_PC_LOCAL_IP>:8889/live/webcam

WebSocket API

To read or control the GPIO pins programmatically, connect your favorite client (Python, Node.js, Rust, etc.) to the WebSocket hub at ws://<Pi Local IP>:7727/api/pins/ws.

When you connect, you will immediately receive a complete sync snapshot of the board's state. It contains an entry for every usable GPIO pin:

{
  "type": "sync",
  "pins": {
    "3": { ... },
    "5": { ... },
    "7": {
      "settings": {
        "direction": "input",
        "state": "low",
        "pull": "none"
      },
      "valueHigh": false
    },
    "...": { ... }
  }
}

Note: The ID keys used here (e.g. "7") represent the physical header pin block (1-40), not the internal BCM GPIO number. Pinned currently supports controlling the 26 general purpose pins out of the 40-pin header.

To mutate a pin, send a pin_update payload. The patch object is optional-chaining (you only need to include the fields you intend to change):

{
  "type": "pin_update",
  "pin": 7,
  "patch": {
    "direction": "output",
    "state": "high"
  }
}

Any patch sent to the hub instantly updates the physical hardware, and the new pin state is immediately broadcast to all connected clients (for instance, if you switch a pin to "input", every dashboard and script receives an update reflecting that change). Those use the same format as the pin_update message.

Additionally, if a pin is configured as an input and you push a physical button plugged into the Pi, the hub automatically catches the hardware edge-event in real-time and broadcasts the new state (e.g. "valueHigh": true) to all connections using the same pin_update format.

Hardware Constraints: Physical header pins 3 and 5 (BCM GPIO 2 and 3) have hardwired 1.8k pull-up resistors on the Raspberry Pi PCB for I2C. Any pin_update patch attempting to set them to pull: "down" or pull: "none" will be safely ignored by the backend hub.