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User Controls

We want to provide as fewer controls as possible without scarifying convenience. The idea (for now) is to have 8 buttons each of them having its own indicator LED on top, and two knobs.

Buttons are the following:

R, G, B: Pressing any of these causes the beam to illuminate at saturated Red, Green, Blue respectively, or any combination of the three. In particular, having all three activated causes the beam to illuminate white.

CTL: Pressing this button causes the device to enter "control mode" where the knobs become active. Otherwise, moving the knobs have no effect.

1, 2, 3, 4: These are memory banks to store (and retrieve) user colors.

Knobs are the following:

HUE: Moving this knob while the device is in "control mode" varies the color of the beam by varying the duty cycle of the pulses feeding the LEDs according to a certain algorithm (see "RGB Color fading algorithm" in section "References").

LUM: Moving this know while the device is in "control mode" varies the brightness within the current color. This is done by varying all three R, G, B duty cycles in equal amount.

Operations such as storing and retrieving colors must be accommodated into this small set of controls.