Christmas Tree FastLEDers - Anyone care to share what kind of patterns you use

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Christmas Tree FastLEDers - Anyone care to share what kind of patterns you use for your tree? Just curious what people liked. I’ve got a strip of 88 (yeah, weird, I know) that turn on with a different, random pattern or color every night. I’m thinking of just putting them on a timed loop instead of just one per night:

• Rainbow wheel
• Stripes - White and Green | Red and Green | Blue and White
• Fireworks (random, fading color explosions)
• Solid colors with random twinkles (red/ blue/purple)
• Various palette cycles

Just thought “tis” the season maybe someone’s got some ideas to freshen up my patterns or want some of mine to freshen up theirs. Happy Holidays y’all!

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I’m more a fan of a random number, picked from a min-max range, say 3-8 minutes. I also like having a more subtle “default” sort of pattern that runs for a shorter time, maybe random 2-4 minutes, but has a higher probability of getting picked. Keep viewers guessing! :wink:

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I have a whole pile of unique patterns on my (Googleable) github account, as does Marc. Am mostly into perlin noise generated patterns.

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TwinkleFox is really really good and highly customizable.

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I’ve tonnes of patterns, but I use a twinklefox pallet mostly the same colour as our front door. Nearer Xmas I mix it up a bit and go mental. It’s IR remote controlled. I’ve tried internet/phone control in previous years, but IR is the most convenient and portable. I’ve posted my code here in previous years - but it requires an Arduino Due and most people still don’t care for those, but I love them. Let me know if you want my code (20+ patterns each with lots of variations!)

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@Mark_Ortiz Why is a Due required?

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memory! All those patterns don’t come cheap :slight_smile:

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Would be very interested in a link to Mark’s patterns.

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@Mark_Ortiz Ah, ok! Sure, post your patterns, should still be able to fit a good number of them on a Teensy 3.2 :slight_smile:

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I need to add credits, as you can’t tell what’s mine and what’s other peoples adapted patterns.

Requires FastLED (obvs), and IRRemote2

Requires lots of memory, so a Due or Mega

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Thanks Mark. I commented out the IR stuff and tried it on a little 32 pixel test rig using LPD8806 pixels. (Actually set NUM_LEDS to 36, and SQRT_LEDS to 6 following your sketch’s design.) When compiled on a Teensy 3.0 it reports:
Sketch uses 60664 bytes (46%) of program storage space. Maximum is 131072 bytes.
Global variables use 10172 bytes (62%) of dynamic memory, leaving 6212 bytes for local variables. Maximum is 16384 bytes.

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That’s a fair bit. It would be interesting to isolate the individual routines to view each effect and see what I’d like to incorporate on smaller Arduino’s. I tend towards 8 or 16 bit (never floats) and very short/efficient effects code. I also like to isolate them into separate .h files for readability.

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The patterns are written so that they crossfade (years ago before FastLED). Yeah - I don’t follow good coding rules, but it still works.