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Compact Emergency Light Control Unit

This compact 2 block microcontroller controls RGB composite lights, giving you various flashing and strobing options for realistic emergency lights, marker lights, indicators, almost any type of flashing or solid light you might need.

PLEASE READ THE INSTRUCTIONS

The block has just 2 things to wire up. On/off to a toggle switch, and composite output to all of the lights you want to control. Or set the "always on" property, and then you just need to hook up the lights.

You set what the lights do by selecting channel numbers on each light.

First of all, SET ALL THE LIGHTS TO HSV MODE. This is means hue, saturation, value. Or to put it another way, colour, colour intensity, and brightness.

The next thing to set is the hue, or "Red/Hue". These channel numbers give these colours:

22 red
23 orange
24 amber
25 yellow
26 green
27 cyan
28 light blue
29 dark blue
30 purple
31 pink
32 red

Next, set the saturation, called "Green/Sat". This is in a range of 22 to 32, with 22 being the palest, 32 being the most intense.
For most lights you want 32 for the most vivid colour.
But if you want a paler colour, set the saturation lower.
For example, for a yellowish headlight, you would set the hue to 24 and the saturation to 27.
Or for a baby girl pink, set the hue to 31 and the saturation to 29.

Finally, set the value, or "Blue/Val". This can be a fixed brightness if you want a fixed light, using 32 for full on, and down to 22 for fully off.

If you want the light to flash, the unit does this by ramping up and down the brightness, so set "blue/val" to the following:

1 Wig-Wag A
2 Wig-Wag B

- Wig-Wag lights alternately pulse 2 lights. Use on either side of a vehicle, or use just one for a light that pulses, pauses, then pulses again.

3 Double-Strobe A
4 Double-Strobe B

- Double strobes flash both lights fast, and wig-wag too. For the classic police lights look.

5 Pulse

- One light that pulses on and off smoothly

6 Flicker

- One light that pulses and strobes, giving a fire like effect

You can set the speed of the wag and the strobe in the properties. The strobe setting is how many times the light will flash per wag, so you will want to adjust it to suit the wag speed. The pulse and flicker also adjust with the same setting.

EPILEPSY WARNING: There is no limit to how fast you can make it flash. If you are sensitive to flashing lights, be warned.

Advanced stuff:

Channel 20 and 21 allow you to set a custom hue. The game uses a number between 0 and 1 to represent the hue, so you need to use a colour picker like this one http://colorizer.org/ and divide the number you pick by 360.

You can set the saturation or hue to one of the variable outputs, to strobe the colour rather than the brightness. This makes for good disco lights.

You can control the lights in RGB mode if you hook at least one channel to a variable output, and the others to fixed outputs. You can use this method to give disco lights that change colour within a certain range.

Updates: mk2 version, rebuilt from scratch with adjustable speed.