Arduino RGB LED HSV “Color Wheel”

Recently I’ve been playing with Arduino, Scratch and the 3pi robot for a personal project that I hope will be interesting enough to show soon. (I’ve got a lot of motivation from these guys specially the little one with big eyes).

To start I made this little example of a RGB Led. Usually you begin making a loop through the RGB scale of colors. But it doesn’t look very natural since you expect to loop through a color hue. What you need is to convert a HSV (Hue Saturation Value) scale to RGB (Red Green Blue) scale that the LED support, and then loop through the Hue domain mantaining the Saturation and Value constants.

Circuit is here, look for the RGB LED example

Video:

Code (I’ve coded it as close as I could to the Arduino sample guidelines).

UPDATE (2019-08-21): Check repository at Github

/*
 * Color Wheel LED
 *
 * Loops a RGB LED attached to pins 9,10,11 through
 * all the "exterior" colors of a Color Wheel
 * 
 * The RGB LED uses a 3 component (red green blue) model which adds light colors to produce 
 * a composite color. But the RGB does not make easy to loop through a more
 * "natural" sequence of colors. The HSV (hue saturation value) model uses a color cylinder
 * in which each color is a point inside the cylinder. 
 * The hue is represented by the angle at which the point is, the saturation represents
 * the length (how close to the center the point is) and the value represent the height at
 * which the point is. 
 *
 * By cycling the hue value from 0 to 360 degrees, and keeping the saturation and value at 1
 * we can represent all the brightest colors of the wheel, in a nice natural sequence.
 *
 * The algorithm to convert a HSV value to a RGB value is taken from Chris Hulbert's blog (splinter)
 *
 * Created 1 January 2011
 * By Eduardo A. Flores Verduzco
 * http://eduardofv.com
 *
 * References:
 * http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HSL_and_HSV
 * http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_wheel
 * http://splinter.com.au/blog/?p=29
 *
 *
 */

void setup() {
  //Set the pins to analog output
  pinMode(9,OUTPUT);
  pinMode(10,OUTPUT);
  pinMode(11,OUTPUT);
}

void loop() {
  //The Hue value will vary from 0 to 360, which represents degrees in the color wheel
  for(int hue=0;hue<360;hue++)
  {
    setLedColorHSV(hue,1,1); //We are using Saturation and Value constant at 1
    delay(10); //each color will be shown for 10 milliseconds
  }
}

//Convert a given HSV (Hue Saturation Value) to RGB(Red Green Blue) and set the led to the color
//  h is hue value, integer between 0 and 360
//  s is saturation value, double between 0 and 1
//  v is value, double between 0 and 1
//http://splinter.com.au/blog/?p=29
void setLedColorHSV(int h, double s, double v) {
  //this is the algorithm to convert from RGB to HSV
  double r=0; 
  double g=0; 
  double b=0;

  double hf=h/60.0;

  int i=(int)floor(h/60.0);
  double f = h/60.0 - i;
  double pv = v * (1 - s);
  double qv = v * (1 - s*f);
  double tv = v * (1 - s * (1 - f));

  switch (i)
  {
  case 0: //rojo dominante
    r = v;
    g = tv;
    b = pv;
    break;
  case 1: //verde
    r = qv;
    g = v;
    b = pv;
    break;
  case 2: 
    r = pv;
    g = v;
    b = tv;
    break;
  case 3: //azul
    r = pv;
    g = qv;
    b = v;
    break;
  case 4:
    r = tv;
    g = pv;
    b = v;
    break;
  case 5: //rojo
    r = v;
    g = pv;
    b = qv;
    break;
  }

  //set each component to a integer value between 0 and 255
  int red=constrain((int)255*r,0,255);
  int green=constrain((int)255*g,0,255);
  int blue=constrain((int)255*b,0,255);

  setLedColor(red,green,blue);
}

//Sets the current color for the RGB LED
void setLedColor(int red, int green, int blue) {
  //Note that we are reducing 1/4 the intensity for the green and blue components because 
  //  the red one is too dim on my LED. You may want to adjust that.
  analogWrite(9,red); //Red pin attached to 9
  analogWrite(10,green/3); //Red pin attached to 9
  analogWrite(11,blue/3); //Red pin attached to 9
}