I have a question. I am just starting and i have read the documentation.

I have a question. I am just starting and i have read the documentation. I have a few questions:
What means uint8_t?
and:
Is there a good guide for making advanced animations?
I have read all the examples but i seem not to get it.

Not an expert, but uint8_t defines an unsigned 8 bit value, which ranges from 0 to 255. This is as opposed to a signed 8 bit value, which goes from -128 to 127.

As for guides, not sure about that, but there are PLENTY of examples out there.

Check out Marc Miller’s at:

and mine at:

There’s also the online documentation at:

Edit: Oh, and going through the FastLED source code is also very helpful, such as lib8tion.h.

@Andrew_Tuline Aaaahh. The explanation for uint8_t really helps!!.

@Andrew_Tuline As i have already said. I just seem to not understand any of the examples. There is always somethig i cant place.

What you can do is to start out with the most basic examples, such as blink at:

and go from there. Take an example, modify it and go on to another. I spend a LOT of time doing just that. I would also go to http://arduino.cc to learn about the language as well.

@Max_van_Grinsven If you don’t understand part of an example or are looking for suggestions on how to modify something, put the code on http://gist.github.com and share a link to the code. (By using http://gist.github.com the code will be properly formatted/displayed, and line numbers can be referenced for discussion.)

Keep trying lots of examples and modify small bits at a time to see how it changes the display. It may take awhile to really start understanding it. :slight_smile:

I dont understand the beatsin16 part. I am doing what you guys said. Just play around with some animations.

What you do then is to isolate the beatsin16() function and use the Serial.println() function to print out the values from it, i.,e.

void loop() {
int a = beatsin16(8,0,600);
Serial.println(a);
}

In this case, the output value of beatsin16() is a sine wave over time. A quick Google search for beatsin16 takes you to this page:

http://fastled.io/docs/3.1/group__lib8tion.html

When I don’t understand a function, I’ll write a test program specifically to get to understand what that function does. I also know that it may take some time to do so.

Be a Google fiend.

@Andrew_Tuline Maybe im just to young to understand all of this math.

@Max_van_Grinsven But im good at math so i will just isolate every function i can find and write them on paper.

Andrew’s suggestion of printing stuff to the serial monitor is a good one. I print lots of stuff to the serial monitor when I’m confused about how a variable is changing or looking to confirm I’m getting the values I expect. (Just comment them out/delete them for your final program as lots of print statements will slow things down a bit.)

Thanks guys you helped me a lot!