Automatic orientation of Sense HAT display

In this post I will show you how to automatically detect the position of the Raspberry PI using the Sense HAT accelerometer sensor and rotate the display accordingly.

The auto_rotate_display function in the script below is doing all the logic. It's reading sensors data to detect the orientation and rotating the Sense HAT display by calling the set_rotation function.

import time
from sense_hat import SenseHat

MSG_COLOR = [200,0,160]
BKG_COLOR = [0,0,0]
SCROLL_SPEED = 0.06
MESSAGE = "Can't loose my head"


def auto_rotate_display():
  # read sensors data to detect orientation
  x = round(sense.get_accelerometer_raw()['x'], 0)
  y = round(sense.get_accelerometer_raw()['y'], 0)

  rot = 0
  if x == -1:
    rot=90
  elif y == -1:
    rot=180
  elif x == 1:
    rot=270

  # rotate the display according to the orientation
  print ("Current orientation x=%s y=%s  rotating display by %s degrees" % (x, y, rot))
  sense.set_rotation(rot)


sense = SenseHat()

while True:
  auto_rotate_display()
  sense.show_message(MESSAGE, scroll_speed=SCROLL_SPEED, text_colour=MSG_COLOR, back_colour=BKG_COLOR)
  time.sleep(1)