Sense Hat to work on Pi 3 B running Ubuntu Mate 18.04.3 LTS

Support & Help Requests Raspberry Pi
#1

Hi there,

I need to roll out a large number of Raspberry Pi 3Bs running Ubuntu Mate.

We have gone for Ubuntu Mate as Raspbian had major issues connecting to WPA2 Enterprise networks. Ubuntu Mate is working fine for this, but now I have issues with the Sense Hat.

Mate version is 18.04.3 LTS. Python version is 3.6.9.

I have installed Mate, run a sudo apt update and a sudo apt upgrade. Everything else seems to be working fine so far, but when I try to install the sense-hat package via the instructions here: https://projects.raspberrypi.org/en/projects/getting-started-with-the-sense-hat/2 I get:

pi@pi1:~$ sudo apt-get install sense-hat
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
E: Unable to locate package sense-hat

Within Python I try to run from sense_hat import SenseHat and I get ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'sense_hat'

The sense hat does light up on powering on, but then once Mate fully loads the lights go off. It is a known working sense hat.

Does anyone have any suggestions? I'm guessing I need to install the sense hat package and Mate can't see that for some reason?

Thanks
Andrew

#2

Hi @ashearera Andrew, im working on a Pi 4 with ubuntu 18.04 and i have the same problem. The only thing that i understand is that probably this pkg is not supported/avaible for our Os. If you have found the answer please let me know.
Thanks,
Federico.

#3

Hi Federico,

I just sensed it was going to be too time consuming so for that year we reverted back to the usual raspbian. The whole reason we looked into this was because raspbian just wouldn’t allow our students to easily connect to our WPA2 WiFi, but we had a workaround for that at least.

Still seems crazy that an OS designed for a board, which is in turn designed to be used in education, can’t natively connect properly to WPA2 via the GUI - which every school and university in the world uses for WiFi authentication.

Thanks
Andrew

#6

A quick search found this page:

https://sense-emu.readthedocs.io/en/v1.0/install.html

where it states: Ubuntu
To install from the author’s [PPA]: https://launchpad.net/%7Ewaveform/+archive/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

I have no idea if this will work or not. Good luck Andrew and everyone else.

#7

sudo pip3 install sense-hat