hello all….yet another newbie staring at a blank sketch here have you ever had

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hello all….yet another newbie staring at a blank sketch here

have you ever had a great project in mind, thinking you had it all figured out how to build, gather all the pieces, and then just stare at them all in a pile on your workbench?

no? huh….maybe it’s just me then….

for my project, I’m looking to make a prop/fake rack server…you know, one of the units that you’d see in a server farm or networking room….rows of racks of iron doing their thing, and the only thing telling you they’r actually doing anything are all those cool BLINKENLICHTEN!

that’s what I’m trying to build….my idea right now is to populate a rack with 8 sets of 3ru & 1ru vented blanks, with some chunks of ws2811/12 lights behind them, simulating network/HDD activity lights….

I played around with some basic code that I’ve dug up, the MOST EXCELLENT wiki, and even have a pretty good prototype of one section of kit…but my gotcha now is that I’m positive that I have used a sledgehammer instead of a scalpel, leaving me stuck with just my single chunk of blinkies….(8px horiz, 5 vert & then another 8 horiz, between a 3ru & 1ru blank)

my questions are this:

  1. how to repeat my chunk of randomness to the next grouping of 21 pixels while maintaining randomness AND color groupings?

  2. am I doing my random assignments properly? I just have this gut feeling that I’m totally kludging my way thru this and there’s a more elegant solution to my ‘problem’….but I have NO programming experience unless you count Mrs Gerstein’s BASIC class in 1983

  3. to prove what a moron I am, I just realized when I went to paste in my code, that the sketch I based mine off of doesn’t even use fastLED…so my next question is, how could the fastLED library help in my situation?

usual caveats apply…thanks in advance for your help, sorry to be a bother, I hope I don’t appear too stupid & etc….etc…

Mike

code based on:
https://github.com/canphaz/arduino-ws2812/blob/master/fireplace.ino

here’s my kludge:
http://pastebin.com/zwz8X0W7

(comments are mostly from me making notes to myself after changing stuff around to see what it do) (pixel count goosed to 240 in an attempt to see what would happen if I added that many…basically my twinkles end at pix50something which is where I ended my counting up bit of hack)

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