Hello, Curious about garish high-contrast colour schemes (e.g. complementary/triadic/...).

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Hello,

Curious about garish high-contrast colour schemes (e.g. complementary/triadic/…).

I’ve hit a snag though because the default “rainbow” map is not linear thus causing wrong colours (e.g. yellow + 180degrees = purple instead of blue).
I did notice some conversion functions in the source code but couldn’t get them to really work (nor my head around the code).

Ended up making pseudo look-up tables but it’s clunky and not flexible (i.e. bad).

Any ideas?
Thanks

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Tried using hsv2rgb_spectrum? https://github.com/FastLED/FastLED/wiki/FastLED-HSV-Colors

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@Jason_Coon

Silly me. I was somehow using the hsv2rgb_rainbow function, mixing up CHSV/CRGB painting calls, and sprinkling the whole with other small basic errors. Hence, my ugly but working look-up array version instead.

Your way is better and I got it working fine. So far, the resulting schemes are a tad painful to watch but I’ll explore a bit more.( I think I prefer those cpt-palettes: much easier on the eye.)

Thanks very much

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@matt_p no problem! FastLED defaults to the rainbow color map, unless you explicitly use hsv2rgb_spectrum.

You might make sure you have the LEDs color corrected properly. That might be contributing to the “pain” while watching. :slight_smile: https://github.com/FastLED/FastLED/wiki/FastLED-Color-Correction

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Also, if you don’t want all the colors of the rainbow you could build yourself a custom spectrum of colors. Might be interesting.

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@Jason_Coon thanks again.
I’ve always got color correction on, and the LEDs look real good when drawing e.g. Mark’s Pride or ColorWaves.
Never tried color Temperature changes though - will give it a try.

I believe the “pain” (I should have rather used “perceptual discomfort”) had more to do with a combination of:

  • the rather violent clashing colour combinations at full saturation (red/cyan, blue/yellow…i.e.opposite colours),

  • being too close to the matrix which is tethered right next to the laptop. Even with 1/4 brightness + tracing paper as diffuser, it’s bloody distracting - nearly an eyesore. Maybe it’ll be better from much further away whilst wearing a welding helmet…,

  • my quick’n’dirty approximate programming skills resulting in a manic strobing effect like it’s an early 90s rave. I might slip in a beatsin or nscale to make it more subtle.

Thanks for the help. It’s been very useful and I got things working.
Not sure I’ll do much more on these classic colour schemes as I think my first ever ESP8266 is finally about to arrive. Goodbye 32K memory, hello Wifi pandemonium!!!

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@marmil
Thanks for the suggestion! I must really be scatter-brained as I have some home-brewed palettes in some other function further down the sketch!

As penance for my heedlessness, I successfully added both CRGBPalette16 and CRGBPalette256 variants to my code. I doubt I’ll use them in this case but it was a good exercise and I’ll remember the lesson: in programming - especially with Fastled - there’s more than one way to skin a cat.

Truly, Fastled is the swiss army knife for LED driving (and bonus: no risk of finger injury).

A heartfelt thanks to both Dan & Mark for making Fastled available, and to you - and many others on this forum – for helping people like me with coding suggestions, problem solving, and providing ideas.

And now, I must go for a lie down because I’ve just received my first ever esp8266 and I’m too giddy with excitement to solder the headers on.