05-Marquee Effect: Arduino Tutorial - FastLED RGB LED Effects - Plus Rainbow LED Effect

Learn Arduino step by step with this FastLED LED Strip effect tutorial for beginners on up. Watch live on the LEDs as Dave works in the editor and debugger, showing you how to craft your own LED strip effects for ARGB (individually addressable RGB) LEDs.

The Heltec ESP32 module used in the video is available at the following link:

Software Prerequisites: Install the following!

Even though we will not be actively using their IDE, the Arduino software must be installed on the machine even though we'll be using VS Code. Thus, we install the desktop IDE and then never use it. You may wish to launch it and install the ESP32 platform to make it useful for quick scratch projects, etc.

(2) Install Visual Studio Code from

Visual Studio Code will be our editor and IDE.

(3) Install the PlatformIO IDE

PlatformIO IDE is an "environment" for VSCode that includes the compilers, tools, and everything you need to compile, build, and run projects for many systems. The Arduino ESP32 is but one of those, so we must install the ESP32 platform within PlatformIO:

(4) Within PlatformIO/VSCode, install the Espressif ESP32 Platform for Arduino

[ryusaikou]

Yay, back to LED stuff, I bought two sets and did a radioactive glow effect for my sons bed, he loves it. Can't wait to learn a few new tricks!

[jenskapmeyer]

To see an absolute professional showing us fun programming stuff in such a nice way makes me smile everytime i see a new episode.

[davidrobinson]

My wages are now being spent on "Home Improvements" with RGB led's and ESP 32's. I have a couple of Projects that I have in mind. For now I will be creating a basic binary clock that tells the time, date and temperature out in the garden. These videos are of help. and I revisit quite often.

[dvohwinkel]

Yea!! Very excited you are back to FastLED. Just in time for Halloween and Christmas!

[johnburgess]

I'm loving this series! I got my ESP32 a few days ago, and the LED strip should be delivered in 2 days. Then (with your ongoing series), I should have enough to be able to play. Thanks!

[gonzo]

Thanks Dave. Your tutorials are amazing.

[oxnee]

Instead of Copy and paste he teaches you how to do it. Cheers Dave!

[BearFulmer]

Commenting halfway through the video again, Im digging this series, I followed along using ArduinoIDE, an LCD display(having to update that a little less often), and an UNO, I had to add a non zero denominator to the FPS calc because it was so fast to go from line dStart to dEnd, I been watching MIT computer science, you and using chatGPT to help me understand the code. Thanks

[jonnyfive]

Love your channel Dave, I'm learning a lot and enjoying your videos at the same time. Pretty impressive as its usually only one or the other!

[JamesGB]

Hi Dave, thanks for your great work, can't find such a detailed vid about fastled lib. Only started using arduinos and ESP32 for 1 month so I have loads to learn but thanks to you I ve made an extra step. Thanks a lot. Now I need to figure out how to make my animation react to audio input. Great job thx again !

[IamEqualtoall]

Excellent video! I like the way you split the screen in your video mix. Please keep up the great work Dave!

[edwinpalacio]

Mr Dave Thank you for sharing this value video.

[mikus]

Nice, printf() brings back memories of writing C code for Lockheed at the Johnson Space Center.

[pippifpv]

Still waiting for the "fire effect".
Your videos are very appreciated.
I like that piece of art fire pit in the background. Can you show how it is made?

[davejwalker]

Hi Dave,

I incorporated your patterns into a program that periodically cycles between a bunch of different patterns. It ran fine initially but always froze/crashed after several hours. After some troubleshooting, I found that it always crashed inside the DrawMarquee function. After a bit more troubleshooting, I found the culprit... the scroll variable should be defined as an unsigned int. As coded, the scroll value rolls from +32767 to -32768, which wreaks havoc in the loop. Changing the value to unsigned fixes the issue.

BTW, while writing this comment, I discovered that int may be either a 16-bit or 32-bit value depending on the HW. I'm running my program on an Arduino Nano Every, which uses a 16-bit int value. On a 32-bit processor (like the one you're using), I believe it uses a 32-bit value which gives a range of +2^31-1 to -2^31. I think that may explain why you never ran into the bug. It takes a LONG time to roll over.

That said... thanks for your videos. I'm an electrical engineer (ASIC/HW guy), but a complete Arduino newbie. I'm learning a lot about C++ programming here. (BTW, do you really type that quickly?!? It almost seems sped up. :) )

[nickstefanisko]

Just found this series, very useful. My intention for buying LED strips was to put up permanent Xmas lights that I can use for any holiday. But then I found a 16x16 chain able panel and I figured I could cover the windows with them and make some kind of fireplace or fireworks display. We'll surprise surprise surprise. The panel is just a strip wired up different. But, the brilliant person who wired up these guys didn't think to organized them like a matrixm no no no. Rather than [1][15] being next to [0][15], it's next to [0][0]. So the convert an (X, Y) to [i][j] I need a logical to physical function where if the MOD of i=X is 1, Y is 15-j else Y=j. Not a big deal, I used to have to write these sorts of l2p and p2l functions all the time when I was a kid to convert computer top-left coordinates into cartesian or polar systems all the time. Now if I can only find my olde homework tapes from my Atari 800, then I won't have to rewrite all those functions. It's going to be fun porting the old fireworks demo from Atari BASIC to C on a 16x16 display. Maybe I'll get a few more panels and make a proper 640x480 display. Oo that's going to be some ugly translations. I wonder if there is a GIF library for Arduino... so many tangents to explore. Game of Life! Plasma! Wifi controls. Web interface. This is going to take a while.

[domino]

Thank you so much for taking the time to explain all of this, question what did you click on to add the header block at the top of the cpp file?

[Dynamit]

I already can the basic of develop in C#, C++ but find it anyhow entertainment to watch this and could imaging my 6 year old daughter maybe would found this some what useful to learn to programming. Sure I have more in depths videos for learning C# but it's more for people that really want to understanding C# and not be enough with what Arduino lib could do by it self.

[danielhall]

Dave, I am hoping that you will actually see this and hopefully respond. However, I have just finished your tutorials up to this point and I have not gotten any issues that I couldn't figure out how to handle until the end of this video. I will continue to attempt to figure this out but I was wondering how I could talk to you about this very specific issue? On another note your videos are fantastic and very informative and is helping me to understand this area of coding. Continue doing a great job on these videos.

[TheRealFrankWizza]

Speaking of kinematics. You should get a STEM robot arm ( I got the one from sainsmart) and do an inverse kinematics series.