Color

The LED functions will ask you to fill in a color of choice. The RGB LEDs will take an 8 bit value (0 to 255) for all three colors (red, green, blue), which in total gives 24 bits of color choices, 16.7 million colors in total.

In practice, a good palette is the 140 HTLM colors.

Typing out 24 bits is a bit impractical. "Dark Orchid" would be 100110010011001011001100. As a decimal number: 10,040,012. Neither are easy to imagine any color from. Instead, DDC uses hexadecimal, where "Dark Orchid" is 0x9932CC.

The 0x is just there to tell Arduino that a hexadecimal number is comming. Next comes 6 numbers, two for each color. The deal with hexadecimal is that each number can be 16 values instead of 10, ranging from 0 to F (0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,a,b,c,d,e,f). The advantage of this being a single number represents 4 bits. So two numbers are 8 bits (decimal values 0-255), 00 being 0, FF being 255, and 80 being in the middle. Knowing this, we can tell that the color above has a lot of blue, a fair bit of red and a little bit of green.

When typing in color values in your LED functions you can use hexadecimal directly, but you can also use DDC's macros for the 140 HTML colors. Look those up in 01_ColorPalette.ino. In practice that means that instead of writing 0x4B0082 for indigo, you can just write INDIGO.