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I'm having trouble getting my RPi 3 to listen to a Sense HAT.

The Sense Hat is getting power and the RPI is aware of the Hat.

pi@BBLPi1:~ $ ls /dev/i2c* /dev/i2c-1 pi@BBLPi1:~ $ i2cdetect -y 1 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 a b c d e f 00: -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- 10: -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- 1c -- -- -- 20: -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- 30: -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- 40: -- -- -- -- -- -- 46 -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- 50: -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- 5c -- -- 5f 60: -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- 6a -- -- -- -- -- 70: -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

However, there's no frame buffer.

pi@BBLPi1:~ $ cat /sys/class/graphics/fb0/name BCM2708 FB

I was expecting the Sense HAT to also be listed here but it's not.

I found a posting on the Rpi Linux repo that seemed promising: https://github.com/raspberrypi/linux/issues/1139#issue-108231030. However, I'm not compiling or cross-compiling Linux. Having to customize Linux just to get the HAT working seems like overkill.

I've tried a few things just to remove as many variables from the situation. But it turns out that this issue arises both when using a Rpi 3 model B and B+. It also happens when the device is running NOOBS or Raspian lite. Ultimately, both those OS's are using some Debian Stretch. So maybe it's just a problem with Stretch? I'm not sure.

I'm baffled that none of the Sense HAT tutorials out there mentioned this missing buffer issue.

If anyone has any suggestions about how to get this missing frame buffer to appear, please let me know.

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  • Do you just have 1 framebuffer? No ./dev/fb1 ? That's where I would expect the sensehat.
    – Dirk
    Commented Aug 17, 2018 at 16:14
  • There is no /dev/fb1. Only dev/fb0.
    – Ben Downey
    Commented Aug 17, 2018 at 17:47
  • Is the sense-hat package installed? Use e.g. 'apt-cache policy sense-hat'
    – Dirk
    Commented Aug 19, 2018 at 10:13
  • Yep. It's installed. It was the sense-hat library that started my investigation into the frame buffer issue. It throws an OSError: Cannot detect RPi-Sense FB device when I attempt to use it.
    – Ben Downey
    Commented Aug 20, 2018 at 13:41
  • It should not be necessary, but you could try to add the line 'dtoverlay=rpi-sense' to /boot/config.txt
    – Dirk
    Commented Aug 20, 2018 at 13:47

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