Akela-Heatmap

The Heatmap plugin provides a LED effect, that displays a heatmap on the keyboard. The LEDs under each key will have a color according to how much use they see. Fewer used keys will have deep blue colors, that gradually turns lighter, then green, to yellow, and finally red for the most used keys. The heatmap is not updated on every key press, but periodically. It's precision is also an approximation, and not a hundred percent exact. Nevertheless, it is a reasonable estimate.

Using the plugin

The plugin comes with reasonable defaults pre-configured, all one needs to do is include the header, and make sure the plugin is in use:

#include <Akela-Heatmap.h>

void setup (void) {
  Keyboardio.setup (KEYMAP_SIZE);
  Keyboardio.use (&HeatmapEffect, NULL);
}

This sets up the heatmap to update every 500 cycles, which is about 2.5 seconds, and is the default. It also registers a new LED effect, which means that if you have not set up any other effects, then Heatmap will likely be the default. You may not want that, so setting up at least one other LED effect, such as LEDOff is highly recommended.

Plugin methods

The plugin provides two methods on the HeatmapEffect object:

.configure(updateFrequency)

Sets up the update frequency of the heatmap. The smaller this value is, the more often the heatmap gets updated, but that comes with a cost: updating the heatmap takes a fairly large amount of computation, and is not fast. Doing it often will considerably slow down the keyboard, and that is rarely a desirable thing.

Nevertheless, the frequency preferred is a very subjective thing, which is why this function exists. Give it a number, and it will wait that many scan cycles between updates.

Defaults to 500.

.activate()

When called, immediately activates the Heatmap effect. Mostly useful in the setup() method of the Sketch, or in macros that are meant to switch to the heatmap effect, no matter where we are in the list.

Further reading

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