Raspberry Pi Sense HAT Emulator

2016-09-07 | By Maker.io Staff

Raspberry Pi SBC

Way back in August 2015, the Raspberry Pi released the Sense HAT, a Raspberry Pi compatible HAT board which shows off a number of different sensors. The Sense HAT was originally developed around an idea to make a cool board that showed off just how much you could do with a modern gyroscope and some RGB LEDs. Along the prototyping road to production it also had gained some extra features such as a pressure sensor, humidity/temperature sensors and a joystick.

The Sense HAT was also the hardware behind the popular Astro Pi Space project, which was a collaboration between Raspberry Pi and the UK Space Agency to send two Sense HATs and lots of code written by UK schoolkids to the International Space Station (ISS).

Since the Sense HAT had been released and sent into space with thanks to Tim Peake and the Astro Pi project, the Raspberry Pi foundation has been working closely with a US-based company called Trinket. Trinket has developed a web-based emulator for the Sense HAT for those who do not own a Sense HAT but are willing to give it a try or even teach a class in schools. The emulator is a free resource, which can be used from anywhere.

The emulator will also allow users to participate in any future Astro Pi competitions without the need to own a Raspberry Pi computer and Sense HAT. The emulator developed by Trinket uses an existing Python-in-browser platform and provides the following features:

• Virtual Sense HAT with environmental controls and joystick input
• Full Python syntax highlighting
• Contextual auto-complete
• Intuitive error reporting and highlighting
• Image upload
• HTML page embedding
• Social media integration
• Project sharing via direct URL
• Project download as zip (for moving to Raspberry Pi)
• All major browsers supported

The Sense HAT emulator also has temperature, pressure and humidity sensors, and you can control these values and adjust its behaviour in real-time so you can easily test how it responds to different environmental behaviours.

The code that you write in the emulator is also 100% portable to a physical Raspberry Pi, without the requirements for any modification. There are a number of free resources on the Raspberry Pi community website in which you can follow the examples to create your own cool projects using the emulator.

Summary

The Sense HAT is a great addition to the wide range of tools and free resources already available for the Raspberry Pi, especially in the education sector. The Astro Pi team has already announced that there will be more projects and competitions for schools, code clubs, Raspberry Jam’s and makers to get involved in. Make sure you check out all the free available resources at raspberrypi.org and the latest updates at Astro-Pi.org.

Tim Peake with Astro Pi on the International Space Station from Raspberry Pi Foundation on Vimeo.