Hondo's Cabin - Print Page

Hondo's Cabin
http://www.hondosackett.com/yabb/YaBB.pl
The Cabin >> Raspberry and Other Pies >> Sensing the world with Sense Hats & Capes
http://www.hondosackett.com/yabb/YaBB.pl?num=1506665414

Message started by Fernando on Sep 29^th, 2017, 2:10am

Title: Sensing the world with Sense Hats & Capes
Post by Fernando on Sep 29^th, 2017, 2:10am

The Raspberry Foundation made it easy for schools and the European Space Agency to get together and gather data about Space on the ISS by creating the Sense Hat.

The Sense Hat is a board with various sensors on it and a 8X8 3-Color LED screen on it to display certain information. It is basically a sum of several sensors out there put into a single board. It also has a AMT ATTiny88 (Arduino family) chip to control or read these sensors and work the 64 LED array. Much of the software for the Sense Hat is already in Raspbian and it's Python has libraries for it.

https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/buy-the-sense-hat-as-seen-in-space/
https://projects.raspberrypi.org/en/projects/getting-started-with-the-sense-hat
https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/sense-hat-projects/
https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/sense-hat/

There is an emulator for it, you can emulate it on your PC System to test your code on it.
https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/sense-hat-emulator-upgrade/
https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/desktop-sense-hat-emulator/

Sold for around $30 - $40, it is something worth to have when one is working on such a system. But it not the only multi-sensor board out there.

Pimoroni is a company that makes sensor boards for the R-Pi and other boards, particularly, the BeagleBone Black. Lately they have been making boards to for the Raspberry Pi Zero format. Their Enviro_pHAT combines several of their Sensor Boards into one, and include a Python Library for the download to run their board on. The Enviro_pHAT costs about $20 and is smaller than the Sense hat because it lacks the LED Board.
https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/enviro-phat
http://www.microcenter.com/product/486552/Enviro_pHAT (have to search Pimoroni Enviro_pHAT on their site if it gives a 404 page)

The nice thing about the Enviro_pHAT is that though it has a R-Pi GPIO, it can be wired up to other boards like the BeagleBone Black. If you know what pins correspond to what, you can in theory wire it up to other boards, download the Python Library for it and it should work. Some instructions are here:
https://github.com/pimoroni/enviro-phat

For $20, it is not bad, as many sensors by themselves costs just as much!

One day I may get the Enviro_pHAT and trie it out on the BeagleBone I have and the other boards (O-Pi and B-Pi). I see in their GitHub Page that is is accessing IC2 (Serial Port) on the board, it is might be easy to do, though one has to see about IC2 support on the Other Boards. On the O-Pi systems, there are some issues with it, depending on the OS one is using.

Title: Re: Sensing the world with Sense Hats & Capes
Post by Hondo I. Sackett on Oct 2^nd, 2017, 4:22pm

Cool. Need to mess with my sense hat. Been scrambling to get stuff done before winter hits. Job and weather haven't been cooperating. Good info though. Thanks

Title: Re: Sensing the world with Sense Hats & Capes
Post by Fernando on Oct 2^nd, 2017, 6:33pm

I'm way behind on a on a lot of my projects but at least I am catching up little by little.