Re: Raspberry Pi SenseHAT / AstroPi

["Dmitry A. Kazakov" <mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de>]

On 2018-01-23 16:45, slos wrote:

> To play with Raspberry Pi I have a SenseHAT, renamed from AstroPi, which is a HAT with some sensors :
> https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/hardware/sense-hat
> 
> Since it was designed to go in space, I would have thought an Ada library to be available... ;-)
> But I could not find one. :-(

Way too expensive and useless for automation purposes. There are 
virtually thousands of different hats you cannot expect all of them 
supported.

Anyway for [semi-]serious use one usually designs a new one. E.g. for a 
BeagleBone board our partner designed a hat with many A/D converters and 
a tiger chip.

The problem is that the architecture of ARM boards does not allow use of 
modular components. A monolithic sensor/actuator board never has a 
chance to meet the requirements, so one must design it new each time.

> So what can be found is a Python library on top of a C++ one.

Actually I would expect a proper driver. A C library means it must run 
with root privileges. Not good.

> But maybe I have missed something already done in Ada ?

What for? If you say that there is a C library, you can call it directly 
from Ada.

P.S. We could consider supporting it in our middleware, but as I said, 
at first glance it looks too expensive and much useless. Then it does 
not scale other architectures. We usually support boards / protocols 
available for more that just Raspberry Pi. Raspberry Pi has a very bad 
call among customers. One can show it as proof of the concept but 
nothing more.

-- 
Regards,
Dmitry A. Kazakov
http://www.dmitry-kazakov.de