Unicorns wearing HAT

by Les Pounder

No I haven't gone mad, I have a unicorn wearing a HAT on my Raspberry Pi.

Ok let me explain, the Unicorn HAT is a new board designed especially for the Raspberry Pi B+

The B+ has extra GPIO pins and two of those pins are used with an EEPROM chip (Electrically Erasible Programmable Read Only Memory) and this chip can talk to the B+ and tell it what the board is and what it can do. Along with setting up the board ready for use.

The Unicorn HAT is an LED grid comprising 64 multicoloured LED that can be individually addressed and instructed to turn on, off and change colour. Installation was quite simple, even for unreleased hardware and supporting software.

I was lucky enough to get my hands on one of the boards before it goes on sale, along with the basic Python library to play with. So what did I make...well disco lights!

WARNING - The lights are VERY bright so be careful

Code

I've written some basic code for this test, and you are free to use it and make it your own.

Grab the file from my Github

At this time the modules for Unicorn HAT are still being packaged, but if you have the secret modules from Pimoroni, this code will work out of the box.

Unicorn HAT will be available from Pimoroni for £24