Sense HAT
The Raspberry Pi Sense HAT — the board itself, its sensors, and the Raspberry Pi it plugs into.
What is the Sense HAT?
The Raspberry Pi Sense HAT is an add-on board originally designed for the Astro Pi mission — Raspberry Pi computers running on board the International Space Station. It packs a small weather station, an inertial measurement unit and a colourful LED display into a single board that clips onto the 40-pin header.
- An 8×8 RGB LED matrix
- A 5-button mini joystick
- Sensors for temperature, humidity and pressure
- An inertial measurement unit (IMU): accelerometer, gyroscope, magnetometer
- A colour/light sensor (Sense HAT v2 only)
Versions
There are two revisions of the board. The original Sense HAT uses the HTS221, LPS25H and LSM9DS1 sensor set. The newer Sense HAT v2 uses different chips (SHTC3, LPS22HH, ICM-20948) and adds a TCS3400 colour sensor. Most examples in this playground work on both — the driver detects the version at boot.
Hardware setup
- Power the Raspberry Pi down and plug the Sense HAT onto the 40-pin GPIO header.
- Boot Raspberry Pi OS (a recent 64-bit release is recommended).
- Enable I²C in
raspi-config→ Interface Options. - Verify the board is detected with
i2cdetect -y 1— you should see several I²C addresses.
Sense HAT resources
- Sense HAT product page
- Sense HAT official documentation
- Introduction to the Raspberry Pi Sense HAT (dev.to)
Raspberry Pi resources
The Sense HAT is useless without a Pi under it. If you're new to the platform, these are the places to start: