Having installed and configured my new Raspberry pi 3 this week, I am ready to start my first project with it. At the same time as I purchased the Pi-3 I also purchased the Raspberry Pi Sense hat, so I have selected this device as the first hardware project to work with, Some basic details of the Sense hat below …

Raspberry Pi 3
March 2016

is an add-on board for Raspberry Pi, made especially for the Astro Pi mission – it’s going to the International Space Station in December 2015 – and is now available to buy.

The Sense HAT has an 8×8 RGB LED matrix, a five-button joystick and includes the following sensors:

Gyroscope
Accelerometer
Magnetometer
Temperature
Barometric pressure
Humidity

We’ve also created a Python library providing easy access to everything on the board.

Using a Rasbian-Linux terminal prompt you install all the needed Python-3 software as follows ..

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get install sense-hat
sudo pip-3.2 install pillow
sudo reboot

As stated the Sense Hat is programmed in Python and the above install makes available all needed PYTHON-API commands, imported into your python script.

There are many examples programs already on-line for you to look at and I will post some of my own documented examples in time but for the moment I want to post here a link to full API documentation for all available commands.

I feel that reviewing all these Python API command is the best starting point as it will provide a complete picture, something that a single simple program will not do.

This way, it will speed up making full use of this great little bit of raspberry Pi hardware ….

So in full then ….

Sense HAT API Reference

Make a cup of tea or Coffee and read through all of these pages. to do so will get you producing programs for this device much faster in the long run 🙂