If you're following along with a Raspberry Pi, Beaglebone or any other supported small linux computer, we'll use a special library called adafruit_blinka (named after Blinka, the CircuitPython mascot) to provide the layer that translates the CircuitPython hardware API to whatever library the Linux board provides. It's CircuitPython, on Pi!

Install Adafruit Blinka on Raspberry Pi

Click the guide below and follow the "Installing Blinka on Raspberry Pi" page to set up your Raspberry Pi for CircuitPython libraries and the adafruit-blinka package.

Install Adafruit IO Python Client Library

We'll also need to install the Adafruit IO Python Client Library to communicate with Adafruit IO.

If you are installing the Bookworm version of Raspberry Pi OS, you will need to install the Adafruit IO Python module (and its supported dependencies) in a virtual environment. (You can find more information in the Python Virtual Environment Usage on Raspberry Pi guide).

To Install and activate the virtual environment, use the following commands:

sudo apt install python3.11-venv
python -m venv env --system-site-packages

sudo apt install python3.11-venv
python -m venv env --system-site-packages

Then, activate the virtual environment by running:

source env/bin/activate

source env/bin/activate

Once your virtual environment is activated, run the following command to install the Adafruit IO Client for Python:

pip3 install adafruit-io

pip3 install adafruit-io

That's it, we're all set up!