Using gpiozero and RPi.GPIO in one script

Question

I use the gpiozero.MotionSensor to detect motion and upon motion to change the state of GPIO pin 17 using RPi.GPIO.

This works well.

At the end of the script I clean up using RPi.GPIO.cleanup(), but then receive an error from gpiozero (see below) when it wants to shut down MotionSensor at the end of the script.

Can I avoid this error? Or can I omit the RPi.GPIO.clean() since it is called from gpiozero?

Error in atexit._run_exitfuncs:
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/gpiozero/devices.py", line 595, in _shutdown
    _devices_shutdown()
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/gpiozero/devices.py", line 588, in _devices_shutdown
    dev.close()
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/gpiozero/input_devices.py", line 299, in close
    super(SmoothedInputDevice, self).close()
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/gpiozero/devices.py", line 540, in close
    self._pin.close()
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/gpiozero/pins/rpigpio.py", line 137, in close
    GPIO.cleanup(self.number)
RuntimeError: Please set pin numbering mode using GPIO.setmode(GPIO.BOARD) or GPIO.setmode(GPIO.BCM)
Exception ignored in: <function GPIOBase.__del__ at 0xb618fbb8>
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/gpiozero/devices.py", line 151, in __del__
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/gpiozero/input_devices.py", line 299, in close
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/gpiozero/devices.py", line 540, in close
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/gpiozero/pins/rpigpio.py", line 137, in close
RuntimeError: Please set pin numbering mode using GPIO.setmode(GPIO.BOARD) or GPIO.setmode(GPIO.BCM)

Answer 1

It's not recommended to mix the two libraries, and gpiozero does an implicit cleanup anyway. Alternatively you can do a manual cleanup with pir.close().

From the docs:

Pin state cleanup is explicit in RPi.GPIO, and is done manually with GPIO.cleanup() but in GPIO Zero, cleanup is automatically performed on every pin used, at the end of the script. Manual cleanup is possible by use of the close() method on the device.

If your script terminates naturally, you don't need to do anything to clean up:

from gpiozero import MotionSensor

pir = MotionSensor(4)

print(pir.value)

If you have a while loop and you kill it with ctrl + c, the script will terminate without cleanup:

from gpiozero import MotionSensor
from time import sleep

pir = MotionSensor(4)

while True:
    print(pir.value)
    sleep(1)

To get around that you could catch KeyboardInterrupt and break out of the while loop:

from gpiozero import MotionSensor
from time import sleep

pir = MotionSensor(4)

while True:
    try:
        print(pir.value)
        sleep(1)
    except KeyboardInterrupt:
        break

That way it'll get cleaned up automatically.

(you could use pir.close() here instead of break but it won't make any difference because it gets cleaned up at the end anyway).