The Raspberry Pi Thread [4]

caperjack said:

ok ,thanks ,i will try some of that tomorrow ,I was thinking that it had something to do with the time settings .and yea i will deliver it to my daughters and set the wifi

edit ''''couldn't wait till to morrow ,your suggestion worked ,thank you so much ,,im learning all the time ,,, next Wednesday is my last day at work ,so i will have more time to sit and read and maybe lean something ,,, thanks again

The python 2 versus python 3 stuff I learned way back when I first started playing around with breakout boards. Adafruit likes to do up Arduino code for their stuff but leave it up to you to port it to python to use it on a Pi. I don't have the skills for that so I hunted up what others had done for me. Some did their stuff for python 2 and dome did it for python 3. That's when I clued into when running the installer if you just say python, its python 2. To install the python 3 stuff you have to add the 3. python3 pip3 etc. Normally it doesn't really matter until you start writing your own code. The subtle differences between python 2 and 3 will get you every time, trust me. Plus it gets messed up if you have two devices, and one installer is python 2 and the other python 3. That's when I really learned the difference. Lots of head scratching going on lol. Occasionally, adding the 3 won't work. That person just didn't cross all the T's and dot all the i's etc. When that happens you have no choice but to run it in python 2. That happened to me once early on when python 3 was only just released.

If one had the time and the mind too, you could have it scroll a message like, "wakey wakey time to get up". And "sleepy time, nighty night" etc. I could easily do that on the sense hat.
I'd be just guessing for the unicorn pHat though. I have the Unicorn Hat on my wish list for my weather clock. If that ever happens I'll figure out how to scroll messages on it. Shouldn't be all that hard to downsize it for the unicorn pHat.

caperjack said:

discovered one thing ,for the picture they must have used thin paper ,it hardly shines through the printer paper i have ,it must be something like scribbler paper ,,thanks again for your help

Change unicornhat.brightness(0.5) to unicornhat.brightness(1.0) and it should be brighter. I "think" if you just remark out that line it will default to full bright. Got sidetracked and missed this post somehow.

caperjack said:

thanks, i was looking today and thought that would be all i had to do,,I will try it in a few days when I'll be home all day looking for things to do,lol

See what it looks like in the light and in the dark. You might want to dim it at night and go full bright during the day.
Add unicornhat.brightness(1.0) to the def yellow part and unicornhat.brightness(0.5) to the def indigo part.
I think you already know this but it goes (R, G, B) 0 is off and 255 is full bright.
Red and Green gets you yellow, (255, 255, 0)
Some Red and some Blue gets you indigo (51, 0, 51)
Play around with the numbers and you can get just about any color you want. Colors RGB

I bought one of the Pi Desktop cases from Element14: https://www.element14.com/community/docs/DOC-83477

It's a neat little case that claims to turn your Raspberry Pi into a "real" desktop computer. I installed a Pi 3B+ in it, along with a 32GB mSata ssd. The kit adds a power on/off button for the Pi (along with software to do a proper shutdown when powering off), ability to add an ssd and boot from it (optional), a Real-time clock and a way to mount a camera in the case should you desire.

Using it with a 3B+ and the latest version of Rasbian makes for an OK desktop experience as long as you aren't looking to do anything that is cpu or graphics intensive. It works well for word processing, email or web surfing if that's all you need it for.

The on/off button works as advertised, the real-time clock is actually not needed unless you plan to operate the computer without an internet connection. The ssd is connected thru one of the USB ports so that limits its full performance. I have been using the Pi with a wifi connection for internet along with a Bluetooth mouse & keyboard. I don't have a camera attached. It's a decent little computer, would probably be great for someone who only needs to do basic computing.