“A couple of these arrived in the post for me the other day. Normally I'd play safe and use one of Pimoroni's excellent solderless hammer headers, but I'm making a concerted effort to improve my soldering skills, so last night I soldered all 160 pins on two Pi Zero Ws and the two Enviro Phats. Luckily, nothing was fried and it all works as expected!
The provided Python library is super-easy to install and use: I made one simple test script to print readings to the console and then quickly wrote another to post readings to my Openhabian-running Pi3. In under an hour, I went from a couple of dogily soldered bits, to a sensor that can turn the bedroom fan on when the room gets too hot, and off again when it gets cooler in the night (with the help of a smart plug) and that includes flashing the SD card.
If you're looking to get temperature, pressure, light or accelerometer data and manipulate it in Python, I can't imagine it being any easier than it is with this pHAT. Outstanding value, too, since when the colder weather draws in, I can easily repurpose it to do something different, perhaps turning on the lights when it gets dark? Maybe I can add a PIR sensor to the extra sensor inputs? The possibilities are endless!”
“I used the pHAT on a Pi Zero along with a PiCamera to monitor light levels and the sunset. Exceptional, apart from the fact that I used a hammer header so it sometimes fell apart. But that was my fault. Highly recommend it for beginners”
“Fast, versatile, cheap. The website examples are easy to follow and tailor to what you want. The accelerometer and compass and other sensors refresh at 40 times per second. The barometer goes down to 1.7kPa or less which came in handy when our balloon lost GPS coordinates above 25km.
Requires soldering on the headers which is a delay to getting started but makes it flexible. Only 6 pins are needed.”
“Once the header was soldered on, I had an instant environment monitor attached onto the top of my raspberry pi. The libraries are very easy to use and since the device connects directly to the GPIO through the header pins, there's no excess trailing cables!”
“I bought one of these pHats at the same time as a GPIO Hammer Header kit and got it working within minutes. I've only tried the python examples so far but everything worked well. Now I just need to think of a project that uses it”
“The sensors on this pHat are excellent.
The colour detection is fun and along with the light levels mean you can use it to trigger home automation kit when it gets dark / light.
The tempreture sensor allows me to ensure my flat is warm in the winter and in the summer I will be using it to trigger my lounge fan to come on when too hot!”
