“As far as displays for the Pi go this one has all the features you can dream of! There is the dot-matrix display with individually controlled 6-LED RGB back-light, 6 capacitive touch buttons and 6 additional super bright white leds on the side. I wonder if the number 6 is random here.
For the same price, you would usually find just a single back-light color display with no controls and poor software support. Not to mention that this is in the form of a hat, so no breadboards or soldering required. As far as Pi addons go - this is pretty much plug and play.
Just as with the blinkt! - software is where this product really "shines". One simple script installs all the software that you need to program and use the display. You don't need to worry about knowing about I2C, SPI, etc - it is abstracted by the Pimoroni software so that you can start using the screen in your projects right away.
I do have some issues with the display though. As one of the other reviewers pointed out - the buttons on the left side are indeed on the narrow side, but unless you are playing one of the games (found in the example code) it isn't that big of an issue. My other gripe would be that once I stop a running script, the display RGB back-light and the white LED bar would stay in the last state and not turn off, until I start a new script or reboot the Pi. I am still checking to see if this is not somehow my fault and if it isn't I hope that it is addressed in a future update.”
“I have both the display boards now the 3000 and this hat. Whilst i love the hd44780 lcd display this you can have an extra line and lots of different colours lighting up the board and with pimoroni's git hub page with software and examples im really on my way with it.”
“The DOT HAT is great fun to play with, and fairly easy to set up and use. My only real criticism would be that the touch pads down the left hand side of the screen (up/down and back) are very snug against the screen and don't really have a lot of finger space for pressing them!”
“I've been using the DOT HAT as a display to visualize Jenkins build jobs, and am very happy with it. It hasn't crapped out on me yet, and it's amazing how quickly you get results.
Also impressed with the Python library and the entire development support / issue tracker / GitHub project. I have already ordered three more, bringing my total to about 7 now. :-)”
“I was going to buy the previous Display-O-Tron 3000, but when I saw the sneak peak on Twitter, I decided to hold off for this. It was well worth the wait! So far I have only had time to run the example code, but I can already tell that the Display-O-Tron HAT (DotHAT) is a fun display to incorporate into many projects. The backlight is my favorite part and what makes the DotHAT different from other displays. You can even play games on it! :-)”
