“We bought the skywriter as part of our group project at university. As far as the hardware is concerned the gesture controls work almost flawlessly and met our needs. However, we needed to refactor the library to get the hardware to work properly, noticing some missing return values and unnecessary removal of data. My friend with GitHub username blujupiter32 should have submitted a pull request for this. On a side note, I wish I just waited a little longer for the sale before purchasing.”
“If you rely on the supplied python code for gestures and gesture detection, then you're going to be grossly disappointed I'm afraid. The sure fire way is to write your own functions, using raw X/Y values and your own algorithms.
A second disappointment is the responsiveness and somewhat unpredictable behaviour under different usage scenarios.
All in all, good for hobbyist dabling, but don't count on anything more.”
“Recently jumped into the world of pi having purchased a pi3. The skywriter was my first add on bit of kit for it.
Easy to mount it on no soldering of header pins which is a bonus. And easy to follow instructions to install all the terminal elements.
Once the synth.py was up and running it was great. Me and my 3 year old daughter played with it for quite some time. Now that I've got the hang of it. It's time to program it to control something else.
Great little Hat for the pi and the possibilitys of use are limitless.”
“The Skywriter is definitely a novel addon for the Raspberry Pi. I only recently got to using the one I ordered after having owned it for nearly half a year, but as soon as I got it setup, it was very usable and the examples supplied in the demo folder helped me to understand how I would go about using it.
I ended up connecting it up to a Pi-Mote Control (https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/pi-mote-control-starter-kit-with-2-sockets) on another Raspberry Pi via MQTT and used it to control the heating in my flat. Currently its only able to turn the radiator on and off, but since the device recognises where it has been tapped (North, South, East, West), I plan on assigning the northern section for turning heat up, and the southern section for turning it down. I have yet to find a use in this scenario for the hover detection though!”
“I love the Skywriter. Its small Hat shaped and very very programmable.
When the Pi2 was released I wanted to show the folks at the Raspberry Jam Berlin how powerful it actually was. I exported my slides from google docs and installed Libra office. Then it occurred to me why not connect the skywriter hat.
Using the great example code from Pimoroni I was then able to switch slides with a "These are not the droids you are looking for" wave.
It was flawless!”
