7. Sense HAT Emulator¶
The pisense library is compatible with the desktop Sense HAT emulator,
however it uses a slightly different method of specifying that the emulator
should be used instead of the “real” HAT. You can construct the
SenseHAT
class passing True
as the value of the emulate
parameter:
from pisense import SenseHAT
hat = SenseHAT(emulate=True)
However, the default value of emulate is taken from an environment variable:
PISENSE_EMULATE
. This means an even easier way (which doesn’t require
modifying your script at all) is to simply run your script after setting that
variable. For example:
$ python my_script.py # run on the "real" HAT
$ PISENSE_EMULATE=1 python my_script.py # run on the emulator
If you are going to be working with the emulator primarily (e.g. if you’re
not working on a Pi), you may wish to add the following line to your
~/.bashrc
script so that all scripts default to using the emulator:
export PISENSE_EMULATE=1
If the emulator is not detected when SenseHAT
is constructed, and
emulate is either True
or defaults to True
because of the environment
variable, the emulator will be launched.
Note
The emulator referred to here is the desktop Sense HAT emulator, not the excellent online emulator developed by Trinket. Unfortunately as pisense relies on both numpy and PIL, it’s unlikely pisense can be easily ported to this.