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Project Plans for the Raspberry Pi Sense HAT?

spannerspencer

imageI have to say that the Raspberry Pi Sense HAT looks like a very alluring piece of kit. All that delicious motion sensing, for one thing, but my spider-sense is tingling when I look at that 8x8 LED matrix, too.

 

Right off the top of my head, I'm not sure what I'd like to do with one of these in terms of a specific project (as opposed to just playing with it, which is where my current inclinations are to be found!). So I thought I'd ask if any of you guys have any grand schemes in mind for putting the Sense HAT to good/useful/entertaining/frivolous/evil purpose.

 

Let's get our motion-sensing inspiration flowing!

  • I could use this and python to program a game called Simon Sez! Wow! Are these RGB?

    C

  • in reply to clem57

    Hi Clem!

     

    They are RGB LEDs, and better still, they are not 'Neopixels' which have limited in-built processing, so this board can render many more colors in theory, and far quicker update rates I suspect.

  • Another few ideas (just throwing ideas out there!) again currently mainly concentrating on the LED portion are:

    (a) A monitor/graphics card calibration device - I'm not very knowledgeable in it, but if all of these sense hats have similar LEDs (i.e. same optical binning of parts) then it is in effect a reference, and therefore perhaps a monitor calibration tool could be made. Basically it would display (say) a pre-defined grass-green color, and you could hold it alongside your monitor displaying such a predefined color block (e.g. a supplied jpg file), and adjust your PC graphics settings until they look similar. Then, click to display (say) sky-blue on the sense hat and on the PC, and make the graphics adjustment again. Even if the LEDs were not binned, perhaps across 64 of them the average would be "good enough" to use. This is all a guess. I suppose sense hats purchased from different production batches could be visually compared for color consistency.

     

    (b) A light-pen and color display or input tool like a mouse. Connect up a photodiode to one of the inputs, and then get the LEDs to pulse rapidly one-by-one (like an old-school raster-scan) and hence when the photodiode picks up the pulse, you know which of the 64 LEDs it is pointing at. This should be feasible if the Atmel chip handles the fast timing and photodiode input. Probably some effort to code, but feasible.

     

    (c) If a fast update is possible (e.g. 120Hz!) then perhaps it is possible to get 3D output (albeit low-res) with active shutter glasses (which are quite cheap these days) and some sync circuit (no idea how the sync works, but I'm guessing it is an infra-red LED transmitting some simple code).

  • I sure could have used that for my quadcop_project

     

    !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

  • in reply to shabaz

    but limited by the atmel 88 processor, probably running no more than 16Mhz, not that that is much of a limitation if that and the joystick is all it is doing

  • How about sensing that an impact has occurred? You could install it in a crate that was being shipped, and it would register the maximum impact the crate suffered while in-route.  That might take too much battery power, but I suppose it would depend upon how long the shipping time was.  For example, it'd be interesting to know how much of an impact your check through luggage suffered while flying.