The Raspberry Pi Thread [5]

That's interesting, close to the one you got from me. Extra cutouts for storage of dongles etc.

I got my basic scrolling day, date, time, code running on my Unicorn Hat HD. I had a couple of hurdles to overcome but its working with no errors.
Found a font that's not to hard on the eyes too. The text example uses FreeSansBold.ttf which I found really blotchy and a bit hard to read. I just switched it to FreeSans.ttf and its actually not bad now. Next step is add in the environmental messages for temperature, humidity and pressure. I'll tinker with that tomorrow. Still no sign of my new Pi Camera. It shipped on May 14th. 45 days is I think a record for time for me to get an order from Pimoroni. I'm not blaming Pimoroni, its more a covid Canada Post issue.

Converting the Pimoroni examples from one Unicorn board to another has been a big challenge. There are blocks of code that I know what they do, I just have no clue how they do it? And what works on the Mini doesn't work on the HD. Not without some changes. The color shifting stuff looks really cool when you run it. Trying to strip it out to get just one fixed color can be a PITA though. I can usually figure out how they do it, but this stuff is way over my head. Taking code out to try and simplify things has usually just broken things for me. I'm making headway though. If I get the next bit working I will be able to swap my Unicorn HD in place of the Sense Hat in my indoor weather clock. A nice big 16 x 16 display to replace the smaller 8 x 8.

caperjack said:

the bigger display would be nice for sure ...this would also be nice ,I just added 3 chances to win 1 of 5 Pi 4's,,,,, 8GB ,Win one of five 8GB Raspberry Pi 4

I did two entries, I don't do faceBook.

Originally I used the sensors , the joystick, and the LED matrix on the sense hat. The PY file your using. Eventually I switched to using a BME680 because of some issues I was having with the sensors. The joystick I use to switch the LED shim display from temp to pressure, and to do a shutdown. I'll add a shutdown button as that's the only one I really need. The LED Shim is usually left on temperature in the summer and switched to monitor barometric pressure in the Winter. I can likely add a small switch to the proto hat for that. I may put my shutdown button there too, its hardly ever used. The indoor one pretty well runs 24/7. It usually only gets rebooted if it glitches after a power failure or something.

My go to keyboard for Pi stuff has an issue. My Logitech K400 has built in trackpad and is my preferred keyboard for Pi use. It's easy to move from Pi to Pi. The Delete key now types o o o when pressed? It does it on my Pi and my Windows PC so its not a keyboard layout issue. And my little ity bity keyboard with trackpad works just fine on that same Pi. Looks like I'll have to replace the K400 with a new one. I put new batteries in too, just incase but its broken. It's just not usable without a Delete key. It makes editing in python a PITA.

On the plus side my temperature code that I just added to my Unicorn HD clock python file works. Only had to fix a couple of indents, which is how I noticed my keyboard was mucked up.

The mini keyboard going into power save mode is what annoys me the most. Anyway I got my full code working for Day, date, time, temp, humidity and pressure. Just have to add the code for the LED shim and edit it for the BME680 instead of BME280. I'll likely do that bit tomorrow. I can put my Unicorn MINI with breakout garden in place of the indoor Weather Clock, and take the indoor Weather Clock out of service to work on.

I swapped out my Sense Hat for the Unicorn Hat HD and have working code. Also managed to get my text to use the full height of Unicorn HD. It wasn't with the default settings in the example that I robbed my code from. From a distance it looks pretty good. Really close up though, its a bit blotchy . It's a lot better than the default was, the Bold font was really hard to read IMHO. Need to speed up the scrolling a bit though. Also need to add my shutdown button. That's for another day though, been at this all morning and need to take a break from it for now.