Disable pulsing cyan?

General
1

I just got my Photon and it’s awesome! It worked on the first try and I made a little knock detector.

Just one thing: is it possible to disable or tone down the pulsing cyan light? I’d prefer to be able to set up my photon so it doesn’t shine all the time (but I still like the cloud integration and would like to keep it).

2

Yes, you just write

  RGB.control(true);

Then you can control the RGB LED via application code as you wish.

http://docs.particle.io/photon/firmware/#libraries-rgb

1 Like
3

Oh wow, thank you so much!

Now ideally I’d like to still have it flash red if it’s disconnected from the cloud. I see that spark.connected() should do the trick!

4

Once you have gained control over the RGB-LED you can make it do whatever you want :wink:

As you’ve figured already, checking Spark.connected() will do the trick - just be aware that C is case sensitive (spark.connected() won’t work).

5

Thank you! I think I got it to work :smile:

1 Like
6

Hi @cyan
To dim the LED you can add a call RGB.brightness(32) or any other number. 96 is the default, 255 the maximum.

https://docs.particle.io/reference/firmware/photon/#brightness-val-

7

I tried to dim the LED, but have a little problem. I use the FastLED library which results in the following compilation error:

error: reference to 'RGB' is ambiguous

This is because of NSFastLED::EOrder RGB in the FastLED library. What can I do to prevent this error?

8

Try ::RGB.control(true);

Or remove the use namespace directive and prepend all FastLED functions with NSFastLED::

1 Like
9

First of all, thanks for your answer. Both methods resolved the problem. But I have another problem now.

error: 'RGB' in namespace '::' does not name a type

I already tried with

#pragma SPARK_NO_PREPROCESSOR
#include "application.h"

but this only resulted in more errors.

10

That is very odd, since when I build one of the samples bundled with FastLED library (with added ::RGB.control(true); and such), it just works.

You just need to make sure that RGB is never ambiguous and actually uses the correct “version” of RGB.
Whenever you refer to the onboard RGB LED use ::RGB.####() and if you are dealing with the FastLED version of RGB, you need to put in NSFastLED::RGB.

I guess the place where you get

error: 'RGB' in namespace '::' does not name a type

would rather need NSFastLED::RGB

1 Like
11

Thank you. Now it compiles. I just have to check at home that the LED is dimmed indeed, but that should be no problem, I think.