“The range of colours and the brightness that this thing can put out was incredibly impressive. I first saw this module at work one day when a coworker brought it in and quite quickly had a crowd around their desk, admiring the light show. I ended up buying it as soon as I got back to my desk.
I've used this in a couple of projects so far, the first use was to provide a visual display to notify when a database was updated with new sensor values. While this didn't have any real functional benefit, it was nice to have a constant light show on my desk.
The second use was in a weather prediction project in which I used an external weather forecast API and created some 8x8 graphics for different weather conditions. The display sat on my desk at home and was blindingly visible every morning as I was getting ready.”
“Everyone needs a traffic light board, display and of course lots of flashing lights, my i present the unicorn hat which is versitile and fully programable and mine even works with cheerlights.”
“These hats are just fantastic. Beautiful quality (as usual with pimoroni) and a very well written library that makes writing python code to control the hat a breeze. Used considerably with Year 8 and 9 pupils in mixed ability classes with excellent results. Very highly recommended for intermediate to advanced users (no electronics required)”
“Physical computing is all the rage now - why would you want to write a computer program control dots on a screen when you can write programs to open doors, turn the lights on, drive cars and fly rockets? Problem is...the move from the screen to the real world can be a big leap for little minds, even with the Raspberry Pi.
Well, Pimoroni has come to the rescue by creating pre-built boards (called HATs) that do all manner of wonderful things - all you have to do is slide them on top of the Pi's GPIO pins, turn your Pi on, install some software (easy to follow instructions provided) and start programming them with Python. In some cases, they can even play nicely with Scratch. Pimoroni is even nice enough to provide plenty of tutorial material to get you started.
This particular board is just plain Genius. What little kid doesn't like flashing lights. However...these are no ordinary flashing lights, these are RGB LEDs - capable of turning any colour of the rainbow and bright enough to light a room up!
This 8x8 matrix of lights can do far more than just put on a light show - if your little one has enough imagination he/she can use it to make some cool retro games - how about Battleships, Pong, Tetris, Breakout, Simon, or even a game based on quick reactions or memory recall? The options are (almost) endless.
This is likely to be one of the coolest ВЈ25 you will ever spend - having seen my one, my 7 year old has demanded one of his own for Christmas. Alas...he needs a Pi first!”
“I purchased this HAT as my first Pi peripheral and while at first it wasn't functional whatsoever on my Distro of choice (Ubuntu Mate) due to a compilation error, I have worked with Philip Howard (@Gadgetoid) and with an alternate Makefile, which is compatible in both Ubuntu Mate and Raspbian it is working perfectly.
Its a tad shame that it gets warm as it does, and also that there are no stand-offs to make the opposite side of the GPIO at the same height. I am using it in the Official Foundation case and the fit is a little too tight, half an mm off the two sides would have been ideal. But overall, especially at that price its an ideal bit of kit to make your Pi stand out. Hopefully there'll be more examples provided in the official Repo soon as it would probably encourage more potential buyers. I will sure be contributing some once I think of some cool ideas. A light diffuser that could snap onto the top of the HAT would be perfect as this thing is unbelievably bright, when I read the warning I never expected it to be just so powerful, it makes sense that the driver defaults to 20% brightness.
Definitely should buy it if you like bright flashy-rainbowy cool lights!
Note: More reviews coming, as I have won the 7th Piece of Great so got ВЈ100 towards a Pimoroni Order :D”
“Seriously. It. Is. The. Coolest. HAT. Ever. I ordered one of these and couldn't do anything for the week it was in transit. It is easy to set up and the Python library is simple to use. Here is an example project I made: http://bit.ly/1HhcR33
My only advice is keep it on low power! Also, consider buying a diffuser as it is really bright. :-)”
“You don't need to say much more about the Unicorn HAT, other than how much fun it is. It does one thing (64 things?) and does that one thing really well - BLINKY, BLINKY, SHINY COLOURS! Oh yeah, and it's really bright.
Once you've got your head round how to set the colours for each LED - I usually use a couple of for loops to set the x and y coordinates - there's no limit to what you can do. I've made various effects, like blinky coloured spots, a heartbeat effect, and rainbow waves with very little code. Like most of the other Pimoroni Python libraries, the Unicorn HAT library works simply and well.
Fun, fun, fun. And did I mention how bright it was?”
