@Christopher_Kirkman1 , I think I got it ! Just a few more clarifications…
each shell has a totally random start position and color but is it totally independent of the previous shell or shells ?
How many simultaneous shells can there be on the strip at any one time ?
If you have many simultaneous shells, should their colors blend or should the newest or oldest shell color show ?
yes, completely independent, ideally without having to have duplicate functions with different names ad-infinitum
I don’t necessarily think there HAS to be a ceiling limit, but at some point I imagine the processing would kill arduino or make the strip look like a mess.
No preference Blending would be cool I suppose, but unnecessary.
@Christopher_Kirkman1 OK I have a 2 strips of 60 WS2812b and an Arduino UNO that I can quickly slap together. Let’s see what I can do for you, I should have plenty of time for it tomorrow.
thanks JP, really appreciate it.
@Christopher_Kirkman1 You might want to look at the meteor shower code posted by @Adam_bluebottleyello at:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BzhLE36asWItbTNJcXJFN1VTTnc/view
and a video at:
Watch at the whole video. It seems to have some aspects of what you are trying to accomplish, i.e. firing off one or more animations while other animations are still running. Maybe the meteor shower code can give you some ideas on how to accomplish what you are trying to do.
@Christopher_Kirkman1 Hi again, sorry for the delay, got caught with a number of more pressing issues but I did not forget about trying to help you with this.
Here’s a very simple sketch that I think meets your ‘specs’. I did this from scratch as the multiple fireworks sketch I suggested as a base was just too much for this task.
http://pastebin.com/XdA8vyH4
Hope it helps…
@JP_Roy This is great stuff! It’s not exactly what I was looking to do, but I think I’ll be able to modify it to my needs. Unfortunately, the event I was looking to run the display for is tonight and I’ve got all kinds of last minute, more important things to do, so I won’t be able to use it immediately.
Thanks so much for bashing this out though, I will eventually make use of it and I’m sure others will too.
@Christopher_Kirkman1 I am a retired guy that like helping when I can. It was fun to play with this animation and wonder what was not as you were looking to do ? Did you miss some details in your specifications or did I misinterpret them ?? or you simply expected something more visually stunning from it ???
First thing I would say is that you can play with quite a few variables to tweak the animation: the delay after the FastLED.show(); MAX_SPARKS, NEWSPARKCOUNTER, fadeby are the main ones.
You can also increase the number of available colors but I kept it simple here to more easily view the overlapping of colors.
Only thing I would ask of you is to re-post your sketch when you have modified it to your satisfaction (if you ever get to that !)
Good On You, JP Roy !!!
After setting it up on my tester, it looks like you hit all the points I set out to do as demonstrated by the javascript demo and what I had initially described. The icing on the cake would be to get the meteor tail effects mentioned above to get it really spiffy, but I didn’t put emphasis on it.
After the event last night, I figured I’d run it just to see what it would look like on the roof. I’m not certain why, but it doesn’t run on my 300 strip. If I knock it back down to around 120 or something, I see the sequence start, break, then start again over and over.
I don’t think it’s a power problem because I have another sketch that lights them all without conking out (the color palette sketches). I’ll keep hammering on it, not only to learn why/how the overlapping works but to have something ready for The 4th of July.
have a look at line 2
#define NUM_LEDS 120
And consider changing
#define SPARKS_HIGH_LIMIT 115 to:
#define SPARKS_HIGH_LIMIT = NUM_LEDS - 5
So all you need to edit is NUM_LEDS.
@Jimmy_Edwards sorry, i should have mentioned that i changed those values too, bumped the max up to 290, but didn’t help
I hammered away further at it today since they didn’t need me in the office and came up with this:
It’s dirty and probably unnecessarily complicated, but the effect more closely matches what’s in my head than anything I’ve tried thus far. Random colors, flickering tails and multiple blasts occurring over each other.
It’s not perfectly seamless (because, math?). Sometimes the shells don’t reach the ends of the strip before disappearing. The tails aren’t as elegant as the comet example from earlier. Plus, coding it this way means I’m stuck with no more than two blasts at a time. As always though, my eyes and ears are open to suggestions on how to improve.
@Christopher_Kirkman1 loaded your sketch and first thing I noticed is that the tails are very dim from the start. Also the sketch freezes at some point but I don’t want to troubleshoot your sketch. My suggestion would be to hack at my sketch until you get the final result you want. It should be easy to modify it to have full HSV color ranges for sparks AND modify the one line that dims all LEDs to create the tail effect such that the tail has the look you want. Good luck !