The Trill-Pi

The Trill-Pi is one of my favourite projects. It is fairly simple electronics wise - it only uses a Sense Hat, and a Raspberry Pi Zero W, as well as a power pack. The Raspberry Pi, with Sense Hat attached, is fixed to the front of the trilby hat (using good old excellent string!), and the power pack rests in the top of the hat.

Using an old lanyard to hold the sense hat on:

As for software, anything designed for the Sense Hat works great with the Trill-Pi. As it doesn't have a specific function, it means that it can be used for a huge variety of applications. Random sparkles! Rainbows! Displaying colourful messages! You can also use the Sense Hat's sensors, to create uses such as weather monitoring on the go, and I'll hopefully soon get round to making a program to take use of the accelerometer, gyrometer and magnetometer - meaning it can track your steps, direction and orientation while out for a walk. All while displaying great flickering colourful lights, of course!

Code:

Currently, the program I use for the Trill-Pi uses the joystick, to run functions such as random sparkles, colourful message displaying, a rotating exclamation mark (because - why not!), and a software sutdown function. However, I can't get the functions to stop once another takes over, and it ends up flickering with many different colours - not what it's meant to do. Also, sometimes I use the trilby hat to hold other projects - e.g. I only had a Pi B+ to hand when I was making a pair of button-controlled sunglasses, so I stuck the pi on my trilby, instead of attaching it to my glasses, which is what I plan to do with a Pi Zero. Hopefully though, I'll be able to fix the sense-hat program soon, and make that walk monitoring program!