Hi! I am helping my daughter create a dress with leds on it.

Peter_Parnes · April 17, 2016, 7:54pm

Hi! I am helping my daughter create a dress with leds on it. She wants to arrange them (220 leds) in columns but as the dresses length is not even all around the columns do not have the same length. Is there some easy way of using Fastled for animation in this case? The columns of varying heights, 1, 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12 … 18 and back down to 1 again. Each column is soldered to the next to get one long led-chain. Could we e.g. somehow tell Fastled that here are x columns of height 18 and have it skip the missing leds in the calculations?

Thank you in advance!!

Tim_Lukasik · April 17, 2016, 8:15pm

I had the same issue, check my post about a week ago. Marc Miller posted a solution that worked perfectly.

Amanda_Walker · April 17, 2016, 8:17pm

I have not found an easy way to do this. I wrote the software for a friend’s LED skirt (http://www.threadwitch.com/projects/flame-skirt/) and ended up treating the 358 LEDs as one long strip, with a table in the code with the starting LED index, length, and orientation (up or down) of each strip. It worked well enough for this project, since I wasn’t trying to line up any animation across strips.

A way to declare a polygon (or just an irregular array of strips) would be very handy.

Peter_Parnes · April 17, 2016, 8:20pm

@Tim_Lukasik , Thanks but that only works for a small amount of columns (until we run out of data-pins). Or?

Peter_Parnes · April 17, 2016, 8:21pm

@Amanda_Walker , thanks. Do you have your code available somewhere?

Ken_White · April 17, 2016, 8:30pm

@Peter_Parnes , @Mark_Kriegsman 's code for the XYShades might help you. It is in GitHub at:

gist.github.com

https://gist.github.com/kriegsman/475e907a9624352c748c

XYShades

#include <FastLED.h>
// Use Version 2.1 or later https://github.com/FastLED/FastLED/tree/FastLED2.1
// ZIP file https://github.com/FastLED/FastLED/archive/FastLED2.1.zip

// RGB Shades data output to LEDs on pin 5
#define LED_PIN  5

// RGB Shades color order 
#define COLOR_ORDER GRB
#define CHIPSET     WS2811

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Amanda_Walker · April 17, 2016, 8:32pm

@Ken_White oh, that’s a much more general approach than my hacked together code. @Peter_Parnes you should use that :-).

Tim_Lukasik · April 17, 2016, 10:34pm

@Peter_Parnes It is limited by the number of pins you have yes. I have 6 strips of varying lengths and they are wired to 6 pins, so I don’t have that problem. Sounds like you want all your LEDs off one pin, and to tell FastLED to light up only certain ones? Like LEDS 5-9, then 18-24, then 45-67, etc?

Peter_Parnes · April 18, 2016, 5:11am

@Ken_White Thanks. That looks like a very good starts. Thanks. Thank you @Mark_Kriegsman for sharing.

Peter_Parnes · April 25, 2016, 9:22am

FYI, in the end we decided to ignore this problem and just show various color patterns using Fastled.

By the way, she is 15 years old and will attend the local city business awards gala this Friday. I think she will make a huge impact compared to all boring old guys in black suits We will post pictures etc. later.

Thank you all again!