The Raspberry Pi Sense HAT is a really cool piece of hardware: it’s an all-in-one board that comes with several sensors and even a LED matrix. Let’s discover it.
1 – Meet the Sense HAT
According to the homepage, the Sense HAT is an add-on board for Raspberry Pi, designed and developed for the Astro Pi mission.
The Sense HAT comes with the following sensors:
- accelerometer
- gyroscope
- magnetometer
- air pressure
- temperature
- humidity
The Sense HAT also includes a cool 8×8 RGB LED matrix… I can’t wait to test the demos I coded for 32×32 RGB LED matrix on that 64-LED display 😉
And last gadget we can find on the Sense HAT: a joystick !!!
And nice thing, all these sensors, LED matrix and joystick can be programmed with a simple Python library.
To use the Sense HAT, just connect it to the GPIO connector of the Raspberry Pi.
I love this card!
2 – The photo gallery
The Sense HAT bundle is really simple: the Sense HAT board and few screws for proper mounting on the Raspberry Pi.
The board. The joystick is visible on the bottom-right corner:
The board mounted on the Raspberry Pi. No external power supply is required. Just plug the Sense HAT on the Raspberry Pi and start using it.
In a next article we will look at the programming side of the Sense HAT with a simple weather station…