Hi All, I've been a lurker here for months,

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Hi All,
I’ve been a lurker here for months, and so grateful for the knowledge I’ve gained from everyone. In reality it was finding this group via FastLED that inspired me to even begin to play with these things! 'm a digital artist and instructor by trade, but wanted something to play with in my spare time. Thanks to everyone here, and many hours of head scratching, I’ve finally created my first project… or at least I’m getting there! I appreciate my example is pretty remedial in terms of the work I see here, but it’s taken many hours, and many failures so far, and I’ve found it totally absorbing!
So, I’m attaching a video of where I’m at so far with my matrix. I’m using PL9823’s here, 144 of them, and after many attempts (and finally coming to the conclusion that I simply could not avoid soldering many bypass capacitors, no matter how I tried!), I actually have something that’s working so far, to my amazement!

Of course, you’re seeing the ugly side of the thing here, with lots of ‘temporary’ power jumpers, but ultimately this will be a matrix with individual square cells, and a perspex front.
I’m wondering if you could offer me some advice, or point me in the right direction for instruction in terms of how to add a potentiometer to this setup, enabling using the potentiometer to cycle through various animations/patterns?
This is all being controlled via and Arduino Duo (ultimately a Nano), using the FastLED libaries (currently just running the Demo Reel in this terrible quality video).
I’m thinking that the potentiometer will be added to one of the Analogue In connections on the Arduino, but I’m struggling with the code for translating this input into something that will result in being able to switch between patterns/animations. The coding side if my weak spot, but I’m an efficient (if not fast!) learner!
Once again, thanks for all the inspiration… any advice would be very much appreciated.
Best,
Tim.
Hmm… seems I can’t upload a video?: Here’s a dropbox link to it, should you wish to see my result so far:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/lyke5qx470winaz/IMG_1377.mp4?dl=0

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Welcome, looks like a great start, thanks for sharing! Regarding the potentiometer, I’d follow the Arduino tutorial, if you haven’t already: https://www.arduino.cc/en/tutorial/potentiometer Then, when you have that working, just translate the analog value you read (0 to 1023) to the index of the pattern to display. If you’re using DemoReel100, that could look something like this:

gCurrentPatternNumber = analogRead(potPin) / (1024 / ARRAY_SIZE( gPatterns));

And make sure to comment out any other code that sets gCurrentPatternNumber.

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Always a great feeling when you flip that switch and it works – even more so after many times of not working! Welcome to LEDaholics, FastLED Chapter!