The unicorn pHat is a hat which althoough designed for the Pi Zero also works on other Raspberry Pi’s and has 32 RGB LEDs. There is a python library available for it and also a couple of C examples as well in the github repository
Note: The Unicorn pHAT uses PWM so you can’t use the audio jack
To get the HAT set up and ready to go you can use the one-line product installer, open a terminal window and type the following
curl -sS https://get.pimoroni.com/unicornhat | bash
This should install to pimoroni -> unicornhat
You can look at the examples installed, these are also available in https://github.com/pimoroni/unicorn-hat/tree/master/examples. At a command prompt you would type in sudo python simple.py
Lets face it there is no fun in just running pre-written examples so lets have a look at a couple of easy ones
Code
The first one lights an led in the top left corner red and one in the bottom right cornere blue
import unicornhat as uh uh.set_layout(uh.PHAT) uh.brightness(0.5) while True: #top left led uh.set_pixel(0, 0, 0, 0, 255) #top left led uh.set_pixel(7, 3, 255, 0, 0) uh.show() This one lights all of the leds red
import unicornhat as uh uh.set_layout(uh.PHAT) uh.brightness(0.5) while True: for x in range(8): for y in range(4): uh.set_pixel(x, y, 255, 0, 0) uh.show() This example flashes all of the leds on and off
import unicornhat as uh import time uh.set_layout(uh.PHAT) uh.brightness(0.2) while True: for x in range(8): for y in range(4): uh.set_pixel(x, y, 0, 0, 255) uh.show() time.sleep(0.25) uh.clear() uh.show() time.sleep(0.25)
A nice little hat that will set you back about £10 – buy it from http://shop.pimoroni.com/products/unicorn-phat and support a company making good products for the Raspberry PI
