Installation

Raspbian installation

If you are using the Raspbian distro, it is best to install the Sense HAT Emulator using the system’s package manager: apt. This will ensure that the emulator is easy to keep up to date, and easy to remove should you wish to do so. To install using apt simply:

$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install python-sense-emu python3-sense-emu sense-emu-tools

These three packages contain the following things:

sense-emu-tools
This package contains the Sense HAT Emulator application.
python-sense-emu
This is the Python 2 version of the Sense HAT Emulator library.
python3-sense-emu
This is the Python 3 version of the Sense HAT Emulator library.

To upgrade your installation when new releases are made you can simply use apt’s normal upgrade procedure:

$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get upgrade

If you ever need to remove your installation:

$ sudo apt-get remove python-sense-emu python3-sense-emu sense-emu-tools

Ubuntu installation

To install from the author’s PPA:

$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa://waveform/ppa
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install python-sense-emu python3-sense-emu sense-emu-tools

To upgrade your installation when new releases are made you can simply use apt’s normal upgrade procedure:

$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get upgrade

To remove the installation:

$ sudo apt-get remove python-sense-emu python3-sense-emu sense-emu-tools

Alternate platforms

On platforms other than Raspbian or Ubuntu, it is probably simplest to install system wide using Python’s pip tool:

$ pip install sense-emu

To upgrade your installation when new releases are made:

$ pip install -U sense-emu

If you ever need to remove your installation:

$ pip uninstall sense-emu

Note

The emulator application requires PyGObject to be installed (GTK3 bindings for Python), but this cannot be obtained from PyPI; install PyGObject manually from your operating system’s package manager (e.g. python-gi or python3-gi on Raspbian/Ubuntu).

Also note that installation via pip won’t create short-cuts for the emulator application in your desktop’s start menu. Instead you will have to launch it manually by running sense_emu_gui from the command line.