The Sense HAT is an add-on board for the Raspberry Pi, creating such an innovative and useful experimental tool (called the Astro Pi) that it has even been used on the International Space Station to carry out experiments during the Principia mission. During this mission the British astronaut Tim Peake used the Raspberry Pi and the Sense HAT to run experiments that were created and coded by school students, utilising the full range of the board and HATs features.
Now the Sense HAT is available for every budding Mr Spock to buy and add to their Raspberry Pi.
The HAT features an 8 x 8 RGB LED matrix that can display sense data via shapes, icons and text. A five-button joystick gives you full control of what's going on, serving as both keyboard and mouse, and the HAT provides the following sensors:
Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) - consisting of a gyroscope, accelerometer and magnetometer
Temperature sensor
Barometric pressure sensor
Humidity sensor
The HAT, together with the Raspberry Pi, is great for learning about environmental conditions such as velocity, orientation and gravity measurements as well as other aspects of space science. Once the HAT and Pi are assembled you just need to install the Astro Pi software and away you go. The Raspberry Pi Foundation provide some great examples to get started with and there is also a Python library, providing easy access to everything on the board.
