Raspberry Pi Forums

I just recently bought a couple of the Ninja Diffusers from Pimoroni, https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/pibo ... ion-layers Then cut them to fit the LED matrix on my Sense Hat. Two of the pre drilled mounting holes line up perfectly with the mounting holes of the sense hat if you turn the diffuser on its side. Long side up. I was having an issue where certain colors wash out in bright light. Adding the black tinted diffuser pretty well solved the issue for any thing but extremely bright light. No seeing the individual LEDs when close up either, you just see the one color. With yellow text I could see red pin pricks of light close up, not now, nice soft yellow text. One of the best mods I've done to my Astro Pi yet. This one is a battery powered, headless, portable setup. It shows a continuously scrolling text message with time, temp, humidity, pressure etc. The text changes color with conditions. Temps above 25C show RED for instance. Without the diffuser red is pretty well unreadable in bright sunlight if your standing any distance away. I tried to take some pictures of it with my camera but the text blooms in the pictures and it wouldn't focus correctly. =(

Yeah this happens because the Sense HAT LEDs are pulsed at 60Hz, your digital camera refreshes a lot faster than that and therefore can actually take a picture between the pulses where the LEDs look like they're off. Humans don't see this because we have persistence of vision. The defuser will help that a bit though.

Yeah, the scrolling text gets caught just as its shifting a column and I get stuff that looks like its hieroglyphics or something in the picture. I've toyed with just putting a smiley face up when I want to take a picture of it, just can't find my round 2it.

I might have to give that a try with a small diffuse screen I have.