I can’t for the life of me find a reference to an already set and nicely laid out Christmas Palette. I built one, but I don’t love it, and am wondering what others have used. Searching the forum and Google isn’t turning anything up, though I’m sure this isn’t the first time someone has asked.
Can someone share their tested and nicely arranged Christmas palette with me?
You’re in luck, Mark just posted code with a couple of really nice holiday palettes: https://gist.github.com/kriegsman/756ea6dcae8e30845b5a#file-twinklefox-ino-L195-L233
I saw that. I was looking for a palette that mimics a multi color tree. Mark’s doesn’t do that classic multi color no fade tree look (though I love the red/green palette for other things). That’s the palette I’m looking for. I built one, but it looks a tad off. I’m at work now, so I can’t post a pic, but I’m just curious to know if someone did a classic multi color Christmas palette they wouldn’t mind sharing.
Are you looking for a palette that mimics classic C7/C9 incandescent multi-color light strings?
One stray piece of learnings from my own experimentation: don’t use “fully saturated” colors like CHSV( HUE_ORANGE, 255,255) to mimic incandescent lights. Instead, desaturate (lighten) them a bit to more accurately model incandescent bulbs: CHSV( HUE_ORANGE, 220, 255);
Also, you can easily choose which palettes the twinkle code uses and which ones it doesn’t, so you could make it just use one…
Thanks. I’ve got a revised palette I’m going to try tonight. Might be better. But yes, the classic old christmas red/yellow/green/blue scheme is what I’m shooting for. I’ll try the desaturation, but I think I may want them slightly saturated, so I’ll pry write a couple of similar palette’s and see which works best in the windows.
And yeah, I love your code. Took me about 15 minutes to fully incorporate it into my setup. To your point, I set the palette as a constructor argument for an instance to do one of the different palettes you have in your example. That way, if it’s snowing, I can REST message my Photon and tell it to run Snow. On my daughter’s birthday, I can run the fairy palette, etc. I love the idea, and it makes a few of my older programs much nicer.
Thanks for that.
I love the idea of having it react to outside real-world events! That’s great!
As for color palettes, a great deal of “success” is in the eye of the beholder. I’m curious to see what you come up with for a color set!
I pulled up a number of old pictures of classic C9-size tree lights. The standard assortment of colors seems to be: red, orange, green, blue, and white. These are also the most common colors found in C9-size bulb sets today, although of course you can get everything now.
Based on the old pictures that I found, and an hour screwing around with the values, I think I’ve settled on this as a good starting point for a “ClassicC9” palette:
// A palette reminiscent of large ‘old-school’ C9-size tree lights
// in the five classic colors: red, orange, green, blue, and white.
#define C9_Red 0xB80400
#define C9_Orange 0x902C02
#define C9_Green 0x046002
#define C9_Blue 0x070758
#define C9_White 0x606830
const TProgmemRGBPalette16 ClassicC9_p FL_PROGMEM =
{ C9_Red, C9_Red, C9_Red,
C9_Orange, C9_Orange, C9_Orange,
C9_Green, C9_Green, C9_Green, C9_Green,
C9_Blue, C9_Blue, C9_Blue,
C9_White, C9_White, C9_White
};
I adjusted the brightnesses and ‘temperatures’ a bit, to somewhat reflect how the old incandescent bulbs were, e.g., the blue was much dimmer than the orange, the white was very ‘warm’, etc.
I’ll be incorporating this into the new Twinkle sample code; thank you for the inspiration and the trip down memory lane to these classics. If you come up with an improved (or alternate) palette, please let me know!
Wow, thanks. Mine is a little more stark, as I went with very close to standard colors, save for red, yellow and orange (I added the yellow, makes sense to me) because I like the 2812 blue and green hue’s. The red is tougher, but was easy to tone down a bit such as you did. I’ll post more when I get a chance to plug this into my test harness and give it a spin. My windows (see my post from last year, they look the same, just new HW) work, and I’m not real keen to test code on something that just works right now.
I put mine up yesterday, a simple string of 250 WS2811 pixels, currently running a simple palette of red, green, gold and silver with added sparkles. I’ll have to try Mark’s code out though 
Excuse the poor quality video https://photos.google.com/share/AF1QipOh_xTdOMbQ-ya1DvJRnFOwexeEx2f4JWVSjdDTL_ComUy0kuEPSM-h4BmUFW0xyw?key=Sk1yY01VUTZBS3B1cVdNZU5rYl9RV1RpSXZhd1BB
Mark’s palette is nice. I’m playing it tonight using his twinkles code. The colors are very nice and work well. The only change I made was to add a Red and Blue replacing two of the whites, as it was a little too much white in my opinion.
Thanks @Mark_Kriegsman