What does GPIO do?
Discussion
It’s like a general purpose expansion for the RaspberryPi. Let’s you hook up all kinds of things like GPS receivers, lights, displays.
What can you do with a raspberry pi? I know it’s a computer.
They used to be really popular for maker stuff like displays, robots, controlling things but a lot of those uses have been replaced with other microcontrollers.
You can also use them as really low power servers. That’s what I was doing with mine. Pi-hole is a popular is a popular use which is a network wide ad blocker.
GPIO is abbreviation for General Purpose Input Output. In addition to 5v, 3v and ground other pins allow for turning on/off to complete an electric circuit in response to logic running on the pi, or connect sensors, or control other devices with I2C, SPI and sometimes UART. The screen attached to the Argon is handled with SPI using drivers on the pi. The other case is connecting the screen using DSI interface which is separate from the GPIO pins
I had a pi I was using with a GPS receiver as a network time server for a while. It was a fun little project.