Run two different patterns on two different LED strips continuously at the same time

General
1

Is it possible to run two different animations on two different LED strips concurrently from the same photon?

For example, I have a strip on which I want to run a torch animation continuously.
I have another strip on which I want to run a comet pattern continuously while intermittently changing patterns in response to cloud events.

How can I run these two codes on two separate threads of LED lights at the same time from a single photon?

2

Yes this should be possible. You just need to adopt a non-blocking coding paradigm then you can “time slice” between the two patterns.

3

@ScruffR Is there sample code that follows this non-blocking paradigm and “time slicing”?

4

Non-blocking can be written like this

void loop() {
  static uint32_t msTask1 = 0;
  static uint32_t msTask2 = 0;

  if (millis() - msTask1 >= 1000) {
    msTask1 = millis();
    doTask1();
  }

  if (millis() - msTask2 >= 1000) {
    msTask2 = millis();
    doTask2();
  }

  doAllTheTime();
}

but there are other things like Software Timers or more elabourate ways to do similar things, but this is a good trick of the trade to know.

The time slicing is implicit to non-blocking programming as your controller has limited cycles in which all jobs need to be done. Just keep your tasks short (or even interleave them) to prevent one cycle-hogging task from starving others.