Here’s a very simple ‘paint’ project for the RaspberryPi SenseHAT. I was trying to draw icons for a graphical weather project, and I felt the need of some kind of paint program that would allow me to draw on the computer screen and light pixels on the SenseHAT.
Here’s my attempt. I almost hesitate to post it, as it’s coded with brute force and ignorance. There may already be a better paint program for the SenseHAT. There may be a way of doing it in 5 lines of code. But here’s my (ham-fisted) attempt.
To use it, you pick a colour by pressing a keyboard letter – b is black, w is white, r red, g green, y yellow and, confusingly, L is blue. You could easily add more colours. The selected colour is shown on the right. You then click in the squares to light the pixels your chosen colour. You then have 2 other buttons – ‘clear’ clears the screen, and the beautifully-named ‘dump’ dumps the pixel values into the console, so you can copy and paste them and use them in another project. My next step is probably to allow you to save the images to a file – and possibly load images as well, not in PNG format but as a list of tuples (threeples?)
It uses PyGame, so you’ll need to use Python 2 not 3 – just open it in IDLE for Python 2 on your Raspberry Pi. I did look at Tkinter, but decided I didn’t have time to learn enough of it. PyGame is much easier to get going with. I probably should have used sprites, but instead I just draw coloured rectangles and then check to see if each mouse click falls in the area for that square, and then light the appropriate light. Very inefficient coding, but it seems to work.
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Each Friday is PiDay here at Adafruit! Be sure to check out our posts, tutorials and new Raspberry Pi related products. Adafruit has the largest and best selection of Raspberry Pi accessories and all the code & tutorials to get you up and running in no time!