Kaleidoscope-LED-AlphaSquare

An alphabet for your per-key LEDs, AlphaSquare provides a way to display 4x4 "pixel" symbols on your keyboard. With this building block, one can build some sweet animations, or just show off - the possibilities are almost endless!

Using the plugin

To use the plugin, one needs to include the header in their Sketch, tell the firmware to use the plugin, and one way or another, call the display method. This can be done from a macro, or via the AlphaSquareEffect LED mode.

#include <Kaleidoscope.h>
#include <Kaleidoscope-LED-AlphaSquare.h>

void setup() {
  Kaleidoscope.use(&AlphaSquare, &AlphaSquareEffect);
  
  Kaleidoscope.setup();

  AlphaSquare.display (Key_A);
}

Plugin methods

The plugin provides the AlphaSquare object, which has its methods and properties listed below, and an AlphaSquareEffect LED mode, which has no methods or properties other than those provided by all LED modes.

.display(key)

.display(key, col)

.display(key, row, col)

.display(key, row, col, color)

Display the symbol for key at the given row or column, with pixels set to the specified color. If row is omitted, the first row - 0 is assumed. If the column is omitted, then the third column - 2 - is used. If the color is omitted, the plugin will use the global .color property.

The plugin can display the English alphabet, and the numbers from 0 to 9. The symbol will be drawn with the top-left corner at the given position.

Please consult the appropriate hardware library of your keyboard to see how keys are laid out in rows and columns.

.display(symbol)

.display(symbol, col)

.display(symbol, row, col)

.display(symbol, row, col, color)

As the previous function, but instead of a key, it expects a 4x4 bitmap in the form of a 16-bit unsigned integer, where the low bit is the top-right corner, the second-lowest bit is to the right of that, and so on.

The SYM4x4 macro can be used to simplify creating these bitmaps.

.clear(key), .clear(symbol)

.clear(key, col), .clear(symbol, col)

.clear(key, col, row), .clear(symbol, col, row)

Just like the .display() counterparts, except these clear the symbol, by turning the LED pixels it is made up from off.

.color

The color to use to draw the pixels.

Defaults to { 0x80, 0x80, 0x80 } (light gray).

Plugin helpers

SYM4x4(...)

A helper macro, which can be used to set up custom bitmaps. It expects 16 values, a 4x4 square of zeroes and ones. Zeroes are transparent pixels, ones will be colored.

Extra symbols

There is a growing number of pre-defined symbols available in the kaleidoscope::alpha_square::symbols namespace. Ok, growing may have been an exaggeration, there is only one as of this writing:

Lambda

A lambda (λ) symbol.

Dependencies

• Kaleidoscope-LEDControl

Further reading

Starting from the example is the recommended way of getting started with the plugin.