RGB LED

Goals

• You know how to get a handle on the LED connected to your computer

• You can set the color of the LED, turn it on and off, and make it blink

Get the LED

Using the RGB LED in our program is straightforward. In this article, we assume you have successfully initialized the devices with the Tinkerforge Device Manager, and you stored all connected devices on a global variable devices. We also declared a global variable led.

Next, we need to know the device identifier of the RGB LED, which is 271:

// Get a reference to the LED and store in on the global variable
led = devices.getDeviceByIdentifier(271);

Now that we have a reference to the LED on the variable led, we can use that variable to call the LED's functions.

Set the color of the LED

With setColor() we can turn the LED on and specify the color of the light. We define the color using the RGB notation:

// Set the LED to red
led.setColor(255, 0, 0);

// Set the LED to green
led.setcolor(0, 255, 0);

Turning the LED off

We can turn the LED off (black) at any time with the shortcut function off():

// Turn the LED off
led.off();

Let the LED blink in a color

Similar to setting the color, we can use blink() to make the LED blink at a given frequency:

// Make the LED blink in green at a 500 ms interval
led.blink(0, 255, 0, 500);

That's it, we can't do more with an RGB LED.