I have written a flashing LEDs construction project using the Arduino Duemilanove. The light pattern resembles the front of the K.I.T.T. car in the old Knight Rider TV series. I am hoping to develop a series of beginner and intermediate projects for Arduino fans.
Complete details with source code are at:
...and the YouTube vdeo of the flashing lights is at:
I would appreciate any comments or suggestions about this project.
Good explanations. The analog dimming looks better than this other version which just used digital lighting: http://www.arduino.cc/en/Tutorial/KnightRider
A couple of improvement suggestions which can greatly increase the 'wow' factor you might like to consider
dynamically fade out the led rather than just setting discrete brightnesses. I recently made a standalone module for adding lighting effects to models and originally coded this up myself. Then I found the SoftPWM library which will do all the fading for you!
Use a sine wave calculation to detemine the horizontal position of the light - that way it slows down as it reaches either end of the sweep.
You can see both of these in a video of my prototype board here
Thanks for the additional info. I especially like Marvin's example with the variable brightening and dimming. I'll add to my article an explaination of these two links and then them to your links for further information.
I might also work out the code for the variable brightening/dimming and present that as a more advanced alternative.
i like how you explained everything (i am new to programing and that helps allot) i also like the table method and i would like to see how you are going to dim it as i am working on a similar program and i need to do the same sort of thing
here is some code for a knight rider program that i made that you can dim and adjust the speed with pots
http://www.arduino.cc/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1286297693