Does anybody have an in depth how to on neopixel manipulation. I have messed around both with the ported library for the spark, as well as the arduino one, but I feel like it’s only scratching the surface of both the potential for use and what I am looking for them to do. I have a few different neopixel rings, 12, 16 and 24. I’d like to use them for a notification setup throughout my home and office, to let me know when people come to my door, when baby is stirring and waking up, use as night lights at night, phone notifications, and finally a clock when there happens to not be anything to display.
I’m very new to the arduino/spark world, and programming in general. So the more in depth and beginner oriented the better. Thanks for the help and any pointers anybody has.
I have the neopixels working. I can adjust color, brightness, speed of the colorwipe, do the rainbow, etc all animations which are included in the library. My problem is other than what the library has already contains for example animations, I don’t know how to program the LED’s for any other styles of animation. Say for instance I want to make a different style notification to scroll around the ring with a few led’s lit, or possibly even one bright one, and a few faded led’s surrounding it on each side. I haven’t come across a How To on programming them. Right now the only thing I have finished is a http post button from my phone that call’s the colorwipe animation I have slightly modified for color, brightness, and speed.
So to summarize, I’m looking for a direction to be pointed, where I can learn how to program Neopixels. I want to eventually be able to program and create different animations that by looking at the style, I can discern what type of action I’m seeing(motion, email, baby waking up, etc). I haven’t began attempting to create the actual notifications because I want more options than the library comes with.
Thank you for your help. If I’m still not being clear or using the wrong terminology, let me know.
You might have to start spec-ing out what are your requirements.
From there, we should be able to give you some idea on how the code can be written.
The most basic idea is that you send the R,G,B value to the neopixels and they simply change accordingly.
The functions/library is written to handle multiple Neopixels daisy-chained togather, do some cool stuff like fading etc.
You can see the source code of the examples and see how they are achieved, change some values and see what changes! From there, you will be able to better appreciate what’s going on and even write your own simple examples.
Haha. Maybe that’s where most of my problem is. The source code is quite a bit more advanced than I currently am. But I’ll keep poking around at it. I was hoping for a beginner lesson possibly but it may not be a beginner type lesson. Gotta start somewhere I guess :). Thanks for the pointers and tips.
@Buds44 - did you manage to find anything? I’m in exactly the same boat with my neopixels, I have 48 pixels making up 3 rings of 16 which I want to co ordinate blocks of colour moving around all three rings in unison…
I can move pixels around, but really not sure where to start with this more complicated animation…
No. To be honest I fizzled along with this post. It’s hard to articulate a lack of knowledge while dealing with experienced programmers. I was reaching out for knowledge but I feel like it was to the wrong group.
My response could be taken with a negative tone,which was not my intention. I was very deep over my head, and took a step back to learn the basics. I was trying to bite off more than I could chew. But the spark community was great.
