Reference a color array name from a color string name

Using Arduino Programming Questions
#1

I’ve coded a lot of arduinos and ESP8266 gizmos but now I seem to be up against the limits of my understanding of C++.

I’m playing with the neopixels and I have a series of arrays which define the various colors. They look like this:

int black[3]     = {   0,   0,   0 };
int hotwhite[3]  = {  80, 100, 100 };
int white[3]     = {  50,  50,  50 };
int dimwhite[3]  = {  10,  10,  10 };
int red[3]       = {  80,   0,   0 };
int dimred[3]    = {  10,   0,   0 };
// ...

I have a serial input which captures the names of colors like “red”, “blue”, “dimgreen”, etc. into a variable called, serialCommand.

If the code sees a value of “red” in the String variable, serialCommand, it runs a method which takes the name of the array element to set my neopixels to that color. These calls look like this:

    if (serialCommand.equalsIgnoreCase("black"))      {setLedColor(black); }
    if (serialCommand.equalsIgnoreCase("white"))      {setLedColor(white); }
    if (serialCommand.equalsIgnoreCase("red"))        {setLedColor(red);}
    // ...

If I have 20 colors, then I write 20 individual lines to set the color. That seems wasteful and redundant.

What I would prefer is a single command that looks something like this:

setLedColor(<to the serialCommand value>);

The code I have works fine so this is not a critical situation. I’m just trying to see how others might do this in a more elegant fashion.

I found a reference to using a hashmap but it doesn’t seem to work with arrays and I’m not smart enough to extend that library.

Thanks for any tips,
Chris.

#2

You could create a struct, containing a color name and a series of values, (r, g, and b). You could create an array of those structs.

You could then write a function that iterated over that array, and found the element in the array that contained the desired name, and returned the index. Then, you would use array[index].r, array[index].g, and array[index]].b as the color values.

It would then be easy (no need to add any more code, just data in the array) to add another color.

#3