Raspberry Pi - BI-COLOR RIGHT ANGLE LED - 2xGPIO

Moving on from "My first GPIO LED", I decided to take a look at a different LED I had in my possession, an L-59BL/1.

This LED has 3 pins and I had no idea what they were for, so I Googled it and found this parts list, and this data sheet.

The interesting bits are in this diagram:

So this LED has two anodes, one for Red and one for Green. This would let me try and use two GPIO Pins.

I decided to leave the +5V LED connected, and so used another Female-to-Female jumper to connect Pin-12 (GPIO-18). This would be in addition to the already connected Pin-11 (GPIO-17).

Original image found here - http://www.raspberrypi-spy.co.uk/2012/06/simple-guide-to-the-rpi-gpio-header-and-pins/.

To connect one anode to the circuit, I decided to use the 3x10k-Ohm in parallel I already had to limit the current for Pin-11. But with the +5V LED taking up another resistor, that left me with no more resistors!

After some digging around, I found a 1k-Ohm SIL (similar to this) that I had removed from a previous PCB. I would use this for the second anode.

I stripped 3 Female-to-Female jumper wires off my ribbon cable to house the 3-Pin LED.

The finished circuit looks like this (the picture had to be taken in the dark as the LED was quite dim in my circuit).

To control GPIO-18, I had to follow the setup steps from my previous post.

root@raspberrypi:~# echo "18" > /sys/class/gpio/export
root@raspberrypi:~# echo "out" > /sys/class/gpio/gpio18/direction

Then I could control both lights.

root@raspberrypi:~# echo "1" > /sys/class/gpio/gpio17/value
root@raspberrypi:~# echo "0" > /sys/class/gpio/gpio17/value
root@raspberrypi:~# echo "1" > /sys/class/gpio/gpio18/value
root@raspberrypi:~# echo "1" > /sys/class/gpio/gpio17/value
root@raspberrypi:~# echo "0" > /sys/class/gpio/gpio17/value
root@raspberrypi:~# echo "0" > /sys/class/gpio/gpio18/value
root@raspberrypi:~# echo "1" > /sys/class/gpio/gpio17/value
root@raspberrypi:~# echo "0" > /sys/class/gpio/gpio17/value
root@raspberrypi:~# echo "1" > /sys/class/gpio/gpio18/value

I didn't actually get any Red light at all! I think this is because the part I have is actually a Yellow/Green two-colour part.