Sense HAT Emulator Gets an Upgrade

2017-06-30 | By Maker.io Staff

If you don’t know what the Sense HAT is then head over to our previous blog to find out. Essentially the Sense HAT emulator is a web-based emulator for the Raspberry Pi Sense HAT which was released in 2016. The Raspberry Pi foundation has since released a major upgrade to the previous revision making it even easier to get started creating some amazing experiments and projects with the Sense HAT.

If you are one of the previous users of the Sense HAT emulator, then you would have also noticed that some of the features were not available compared to the hardware version. The Raspberry Pi foundation received some funding from the UK Space Agency to help develop this project even further to make it an all-round polished application for everyone to use. From this point onwards they have fully developed the movement sensors and have also developed a 3D interface with Pygame event handling for roll, pitch and yaw sensing.

Upgraded Sensors

On the actual physical hardware for the Sense HAT, real sensor reacts to changes in the environment such as slight fluctuations in temperature or humidity. The emulator currently and previously had sliders in its interface, in which you could interact with to change these emulated values. Having the ability to actually emulate the normal movement from sensors proved more challenging, hence it was excluded from the first revision of the emulator. The latest upgrade to the sense HAT emulator introduces a 3D model of the Sense HAT in which you can move and rotate with your mouse cursor to emulate this type of movement.

Moving the model in the emulator changes the values of the accelerometer, gyroscope, and magnetometer sensors. Moreover, the code that you write for the emulator can now be directly ported over to the physical Sense HAT, allowing users to prototype their projects in the emulator before upload to the Sense HAT on the Raspberry Pi.

Not only is there a fully functional Sense HAT 3D model but there is now an Astro Pi mode, which houses the Sense HAT in an Astro Pi case. The idea behind this is to allow users to see clearly the correct orientation of the Sense HAT matrix screen and also the direction of the joystick is correct.

Figure 1: Sense HAT Emulator 3D Models

Currently the Sense HAT emulator only works in Chrome, Safari and Opera due to the JavaScript files that were used to develop the 3D models.

If your new to the Sense HAT then you can also check out the available resources in getting started with using the Sense HAT on the Raspberry Pi website.