Arduino Color Mixer

This tutorial is pretty easy and requires a little Arduino and electronics knowledge, if you're not familiar with Arduino, I'll include links to guide you through the tutorial.

In this tutorial we'll generate all the possible colors that you can see with just a twist. It will also make you see through the RGB color model and understanding how today's displays work.

We'll also use Arduino analog Input / Ouput ( referred to as I/O later in tutorial ) and will learn how to read and write analog voltages on Arduino pins.

Step 1: What You Need?

1 x Arduino UNO  
1 x Breadboard

1 x USB Type-B Cable 
3 x 5k Ohm Potentiometers
3 x 330 Ohm Resistors
1 x RGB LED or RGB Module 

Male-to-Male Jumper Wires 
Female-to-Male Jumper Wires
1 x Computer with Arduino IDE

Optional

Cable Cover
Arduino Compatible UNO Ultimate Starter Kit / Learning Kit
USB To Power Jack Cable

Don't have components? Don't worry. Just click the component's name. 

Step 2: Connecting The Pot.

The pot will be our voltage divider circuit, where Vout is the Arduino pin.

Voltage Divider Circuit

In a nutshell, it transforms a adjustable amount of the voltage (changes by twisting the rotor) to the Arduino analog input pin ( Vout ) this link explains the topic even further.

Pot Voltage Divider 

Connect the pot as illustrated in the image, connecting the outer terminals on either 5v or GND doesn't matter at all, the most important connection is the middle terminal, which goes to the analog input pins.

You obtain the 5v and GND from the Arduino pins.

I'm using the Orange for the 5v ( instead of Red ) to make easier to differentiate between power and signal lines.

Repeat this connection for the 3 pots for each color.

I want to keep the connections as tidy as possible so I'll connect the pot for the Red color on A0, Green on A1 and Blue on A2.

Step 3: Connecting The RGB LED.

The RGB LED uses the same concept of the conventional LED (diode) the magic happens because it contains 3 LEDS beside each other, when the light from those LEDs fall on your retina they represent different colors because you view them as a single combined color.

Since we have 256 value for each PWM output and 3 pins that represent Red Green Blue, we have a total of 256 * 256 * 256 colors which is 16,777,216 colors (almost 17 Million).

The RGB Led is connected the same way you'd connect a normal LED but you repeat the work 3 times.

NOTE: Don't forget to connect the 330 Ohm resistor because I made this mistake and got my Red LED burnt out electricity won't do much work to get an LED burnt, so take care.

Step 4: Upload The Code.

 
The code of the Arduino does those simple tasks in a sequential manner.

In the Setup

• Set the mode of 3 analog input pins to input
• Set the mode of 3 pwm (analog output) pins to output

In the Loop

• Read the value of the pot. using analogRead function
• Map the value from the analog pin to a matching PWM value using the map
• function
• Write the PWM value to the analog pin using analogWrite function

Step 5: Test Your Circuit.

Now you have the ultimate color generator with 17M colors! congrats!!

Download:

Arduino IDE

Source: https://create.arduino.cc/projecthub/shakram02/arduino-color-mixer-d6264a?ref=platform&ref_id=424_trending__beginner_&offset=81

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Author & Editor

My Robot Education Sdn. Bhd. (Robotedu.my) was founded in 2015 as the first robotics education centre in Malaysia to provide Arduino-based robotics courses for youths. Our vision is to be able to provide robotics education to every youth in Malaysia.