This is the first of hopefully a series of tutorials on using a Raspberry Pi to do what modellers often do with more mundane devices such as switches. These are aimed at the modeller rather than the serious hardcore programmer or electronics hobbyist, but does assume a basic knowledge of electronics and assumes you have already set up your RPi and installed the RPi.GPIO package. I won't go into that here - if you have any trouble see the Raspberry Pi or Adafruit forums.

Note that my RPi is running Raspbian (Debian Linux). This is not the only operating system available but I haven't looked at the others.

I have also attached the Adafruit GPIO breakout kit and breadboard sitting on a Pi Dish.

I connected one positive rail to 3.3V (pin 1), the other positive rail to 5V (pin 2) and the negative rails to 0V/GND (pin 6). This is not the only way to do things but I found it convenient.