Loading Profile...
BlinkM MaxM - BlinkMChuck fade / noise problem
Hi, I've been trying for a while now to get a smooth fade from totally dark to full white with the MaxM through the BlinkMChuck script. The problem is that the first value after completely dark is visually very strong, and the rest of the fade between 30 and 255 fairly unnoticeable. Also, the accelerometer's noise between 0 and 1 causes the light to continuously flicker at the verge of darkness which is very annoying. I suppose the mapping as in Tod's script has to do with it, but I just cant figure out how to solve this. I've noticed the script running smoother without the serial.println and also found out I had to run over RGB rather than HSB due to the bug in the fading of the latter. But I can't manage a nice fade - any hints would be very much appreciated. Cheers!
I’m riddled
2
people have this question
I have this question, too!
Tell me when someone answers.
The more people who ask this question, the more it gets noticed.
The more people who ask this question, the more it gets noticed.
Create a customer community for your own organization
Plans starting at $19/month
-
Inappropriate?Hi Ed,
The noticible steps at the lower end is one of the problems with the 8-bit PWM that BlinkM uses. Also, BlinkM does voltage PWM instead of current PWM, and this makes the low-end of the scale more "steppy" than the upper end of the scale. We've been investigating improvements to BlinkM to make these steps not as noticeable. For now, there are a variety of ways to deal with this.
In the Arduino sketch, you can work-around this a few ways. One way is to accumulate several readings from the input device (whatever it is), and do a running average to smooth out jittery inputs. Check out the Arduino Smoothing tutorial for an example of this.
Another way is to set the BlinkM fadespeed to be slower. This effectively creates a filter for quickly changing values that may work for you.
A visual work-around would be to diffuse the light coming out of the MaxM so that low-end changes aren't that visible. A sort of visual filter. Try some scrunched up tissue paper or similar. The problem with MaxM is that it's so bright it sort of blows out our ability to detect brightness changes. Diffusing it helps.
The company says
this answers the question
EMPLOYEE
