»STEMMA QT
OUR EXPERT
Pimoroni’s Display HAT Mini offered a little something extra compared to other screens. Stemma QT is a polarised connector. It only fits in one way, and was created by Adafruit as a smaller version of its Stemma connector. Stemma QT is essentially I2C broken out for use with components modified to use the Stemma QT standard. Sure, we pay a little extra on top of the components base price, but we get the convenience of a single cable and no messy wiring. Because Stemma QT is just I2C we can use the components with other boards, such as Arduino, Raspberry Pi and micro:bit. This can be achieved via a Stemma QT to breadboard cable, or by soldering pins to the components breakout points.
In the tutorial we used CircuitPython on the Raspberry Pi to access the Stemma QT port on the Display HAT Mini. We could have used plain I2C and a few Python modules, but the beauty of CircuitPython is that we can mix it with regular Python 3, and Adafruit has curated a series of Python modules and tutorials that work seamlessly. In LXF275 we introduced CircuitPython and showed how the same code, written on a Raspberry Pi could be transferred to a far less-powerful microcontroller board to achieve the same effect.