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.