Chroma Haze, an interesting light effect

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Motivation

  • I have a RGB strip on my bed connected to ESPHome
  • Set colors are boring
  • Fixed patterns are predictable
  • Random colors look bad
  • What if I could create a random gradient that looks good?

Process

  • Tried a number of things, eventually settled on a color wipe-based effect, the color is based off a drifting hue and a sorta-random saturation
  • This way the light strip is different every time, and can create some awesome gradients

Result

Here’s a GIF of a timelapse of the light strip. The GIF is really low quality, hopefully it’s enough to just show that it is indeed random.

https://i.ibb.co/tXhWyqT/ezgif-com-video-to-gif.gif(image larger than 3 MB)

Here’s the code for the light effect:

      - addressable_lambda:
          name: "Chroma Haze"
          update_interval: 100ms
          lambda: |
            static uint8_t hue = 160;
            static uint16_t saturation = 255;

            hue = hue - 5 + (uint16_t)(random_float() * 10);
            float rand_v = random_float();
            uint16_t new_saturation = 255 - (uint16_t)(rand_v * rand_v * 200);
            saturation = (saturation * 7 + new_saturation) / 8;
            if ((hue < 30 || hue > 225) && saturation > 200) {
              saturation = (saturation * 2 + 180) / 3;
            }

            it.shift_right(1);
            it[0] = ESPHSVColor(hue, saturation, 255);
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