Issue with UnicornHat on Pi Zero WH

Support
1

Hi there,

Hoping that someone could help. I have a new Unicorn pHAT that I have installed on a Pi Zero WH.

  • I’m running Raspian Buster, fully updated, all dependencies are present. SPI is enabled.

  • I can run detect.py and it returns that a pHAT is connected, and can run any of the examples without returning errors.

However the pixels don’t light up on the Unicornhat.

Linux pizero 4.19.118+ #1311 Mon Apr 27 14:16:15 BST 2020 armv6l GNU/Linux
PRETTY_NAME=“Raspbian GNU/Linux 10 (buster)”
NAME=“Raspbian GNU/Linux”
VERSION_ID=“10”
VERSION=“10 (buster)”
VERSION_CODENAME=buster

2

Did you try running them as sudo?

3

Hi, yes am running as sudo. Have tried using IDLE and via Terminal.

4

Ok, was a bit of a shot in the dark. I have the new Unicorn Hat Mini, and a Unicorn Hat HD. I don’t have the Hat though. I remembered a thread complaining about having to run as sudo with the Hat. Is your hat firmly pressed down / attached to the GPIO?

5

Not a problem, thanks for asking.

I’ve looked into a bunch of things, and am a little embarrassed to say the issue was that I have a Unicorn Hat Mini, not a pHAT. The Unicorn Hat Mini runs off a different library to the other unicorn hats, accessible here. https://github.com/pimoroni/unicornhatmini-python

After installing the right library, all working.

6

That happens, no harm done though, other than some time wasted and some head scratching.
Yeah, the pinouts are different, and they way they work is just enough different that you have to edit the examples to get them to work on a different Unicorn than what they were written for. Or run scroll hat code on a Unicorn etc.