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Use the cursor to change the colour of neopixels. Create light experiences using visual software like photoshop or after-effects.

When you want to prototype light behaviour that is beyond the blinking LED, things start to become tricky. You can of course ‘hardcode’ the behaviour with some for-loops, arrays or a sequence of instructions; but it is a tricky process and is hard when you want to explore; sometimes you don’t really know what would look good, or would be understandable.

What if you can just hover over a colour or colours, and you would see how that would look in your prototype or project. Also by moving faster, or slower, you can see how changes and colour transitions would look. Now you can also use more visual-based software, like Photoshop, After-effects, Figma or Sketch.

This project contains two pieces of code; one to capture the current location of the cursor and find out what colour(s) it is pointing to (in Processing). And one that is connected to the Arduino that takes the RGB colours from the screen and sends it to the neopixel(s) (of course with a bit of tweaking; servo’s and other devices could also be controlled in this way).

Especially when you want to sync sound experiences with the light experiences or on-screen animations these examples can help out; in the course sound design at Umeå Institute of design this code has been used to do video prototyping or make experience prototypes (for user-testing or presenting); the sound can be part of an after effects project while you can also influence the light behaviour (by manipulating visual effects on the screen).”

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