Old man's beginner question ; ) To get my teens into micro-controllers and coding,

Electronics FastLED Archive
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#1

Old man’s beginner question ; )

To get my teens into micro-controllers and coding, we married a Trinket Pro to an APA102C strip and began with replicating the cheap & cheerful “Meteor with glittering trail” effect. It sort of works.

https://gist.github.com/anonymous/dd00089e918725031d25e8874aa4d42e).

How would one go about 1. having the trail glitter properly (now only randomly dimmed) and 2. obtaining a colourful trail (from white over orange to red) and 3. compensate visual brightness impression for a regularly fading non-glittering trail (a fading gradient from white to “black” does look to bright towards the very end of the trail, meaning not visually linearly fading)?

Any hints very much appreciated & happy new 2018!

#2

Hi @Andreas_Hopf : I would recommend that you look at the outstanding MeteorShower sketch by Jon Burroughs as seen in Adam bluebottleyellowboxyellyfish’s clock post at:

https://plus.google.com/107742111066361257243/posts/duh8EWk2KpF

You should be able to modify the code available in that post to get the effect that you desire.

Also, as Marc Miller and others have stated (see http://fastled.io/faq): please put your code on:

https://gist.github.com/

And then please edit your post here, deleting all the code in your G+ post and just share a link to your code at http://gist.github.com. Code does not always display properly here in G+ and is hard to read on some mobile devices. Plus line numbers can be referenced in discussion with the gist code.

#3

Ok, the code snippet has relocated. I was under the impression that we could simply assign a palette regarding issue 2.

That long and complex code from John Burroughs makes for some quite interesting displays, but it is far too complex for me and my little ones to grasp, but thanks for sharing it nonetheless!

#4

@Andreas_Hopf - Check out the following sketch that I just posted in Gist:

https://gist.github.com/chemdoc77/efdfb49c9de1b20022eedf8737b657d1

It should help you get the effect that you desire in a way that you and your teens can understand. You can add different colors to the tail by adding after line 42:

leds[pos-4] = CRGB::Orange;
leds[pos-6] = CRGB::White;

Also in line 42, you could assign the color from a palette, too.

Finally, you could explore the use of the glitter function from the FastLED example – DemoReel100.

Happy New Year!

#5

Thanks, Ken. Very much appreciated. This is fun, even for us old sods ; ) and one learns a bit about coding, too.

Is it possible to extend this to 288 LEDs (two APA102C connected), see my question above from 10th January? We only ever get 255 LEDs lit up (with many sketches, lightly modified).