I am new in light painting. Does anyone work at light painting with FastLED library?
This guy is on this forum and I think he uses this library, check it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=plvzcUgFM3c&list=UU_j2OnjThvw_Ne1oyOBds3g
Hi! Yep, that’s me and it is indeed using the wonderful FastLED. I’m always slightly surprised by the lack of light painting on here after the popularity of the pixel stick kickstarter and its expense compared to DIY. I don’t currently have any publicly available code or how-to’s but if you have any questions or advice you’d like then ask away! here are some of the pictures i’ve done: https://plus.google.com/u/0/b/118143068203501048597/118143068203501048597/photos
The basic method i used for these was to put the images onto an SD card and then read it from there using an arduino compatible controller for display on the lights. It doesn’t matter what controller you have really, i’ve used an arduino pro mini, teensy 2.0 and teensy 3.1 and all were great. There are lots of good tutorials on using an SD card with arduino available online and it’s easy to wire (but as the tutorials will tell you - pay attention to what voltage level the signals are). For lights i used ws2812b/neo pixel strips which are fast enough to draw images even while moving quickly. For power i used a small DC-DC converter attached to a 2-cell 7.4V li-poly battery, this reduced the voltage to 5V for the lights. it just needs to have enough amps to do 1-2 metres of lights (any more is hard to use!). I got the DC-DC and SD breakout on ebay for very little money, the battery (and a charger) from hobbyking, the lights from aliexpress. it should be possible to buy ALL the parts to make a 2m light stick for around 40-50 pounds or less.
I think it’s because light painting is surprisingly specialised— the Kickstarter did surprisingly well to what I thought it might do— I think it was lot of mildly over enthusiastic people backing it and forgetting it takes some skill and time to do anything decent with it
search for “blinky tape” its an out of the box option for light painting for about $60+
@James_Carruthers - I can assure you I have very little in the way of photography skills, it’s really very forgiving and easy to get good images immediately. I expected problems with images stretching/squashing or the movement from walking with the stick but it all just worked! You don’t even need a camera that can do long exposure now either which is the only real technical requirement for the camera used, there are apps for android that can blend images to do a pseudo long-exposure. For convenience then try it out lots of times with different exposure times using a static strip and moving the camera to see what settings work - it’s harder to get it straight but the same settings are then perfect for doing it with a moving strip and static camera.