Hi! My name is Jesse. I’m building a lamp that senses the outdoor temperature and turns a neopixel strip a certain color relative to the temperature in degrees F. I’d like to kick around some ideas about what colors i could use to indicate the temp. I want to keep it a little basic as it is a project for a capstone course, later I can add all kinds of functions!
Some of my ideas are:
Divide the color spectrum evenly over 100 degrees and display a single color for each temp.
Use ten colors and divide the strip in half, with the tens and ones digit each displaying the color that corresponds to that number. (already working on this one, I have a nice gradient function that works!)
I think i like number 2 better because you will be able to read the actual temperature as with number 1 you would only have a general idea (which might not be a bad feature). Chip in on the one you like, or suggest some other ideas. Thanks
Jesse
What popped into my mind was coloring the strip from about hue 200 to hue 0 at a low brightness, and then indicate the current temp with a broad group of pixels that go from full brightness back down to the low brightness level. (Depending on how many pixels the strip has you could make this broad group a bit wider or keep it tight.) Color ramp naturally matches a typical thermometer’s cool to warm scale and you can always get a feel for where the current temp is on the scale as a whole. A small amount of diffusion in front of the strip might be needed to make the bright spot show up better.
Thats a neat idea Marc! If I was keeping the strip (60 leds) stretched out I would seriously consider that (and I may still, it doesn’t take anything to test a sketch). Right now I have the strip wrapped around a tube and installed in a mason jar with parchment diffuser.
Here is my project, or most of it. The feather will fit insidde the tube and only a power wire will go through a grommet on the lid, should be nice. missing/deleted image from Google+
@marmil The temp sensor is a TMP 36 into a feather M0, powered by a li-ion cell. I am building a small ventilated box that will be mounted under one of my eaves in the shade. Ultimately I will add a solar panel and charger board to it. As of now, I have all of the temp gathering, sending, receiving, and converting working. I can manipulate the raw sensor integer or the converted temp value (float) in C or F. It would be interesting to control the colors using the temp value as part of an algorithm.
To me it seems whichever display method I choose would best be served by using a switch case for all of the temp values. However, there might be a neater way using a loop and doing math on the temp values to directly influence the colors. Hmmm.
@marmil I’ve been looking at some of your examples, and I noticed you used a switch case for the light temperatures. That might just work for my project as well.
If you clamp your temp read values to some min and max value, then you can map that to a hue range.
displayHue = map( inputTemp, tempLow, tempHigh, hueLow, hueHigh );
@marmil Hay Marc, I used the map function for 0-100 degrees F and reversed the Hues using a range of like 210 to 0. It works great! One line of code! Sweet!
