LED strip¶

The LED strip allows you to control the quadcopter’s LEDs using Python. You can execute pre-made animations, set a single color for the entire strip, or control each LED individually for custom patterns.

Initialization¶

To control the quadcopter, instantiate a Clover2 object.

from clover2 import Clover2

drone = Clover2()
# or with a specific node name:
drone = Clover2("my_drone")

Clover2 serves as a wrapper around a ROS 2 node. Upon instantiation, the node is initialized, and a background thread is launched to handle ROS 2 operations.

Animations¶

The simplest way to use the LED strip is through built-in animations. Each animation supports a duration parameter, which specifies how long the animation should run in seconds. If no duration is specified, the animation will run indefinitely until you start a new animation or send a direct command to the strip.

drone.led().rainbow(period=2.0, duration=5.0)     # Rainbow effect: 2s per cycle, runs for 5s
drone.led().blink(255, 0, 0, period=0.5)          # Red flashing: 0.5s per on/off cycle
drone.led().solid_color(0, 255, 0, duration=1.0)  # Solid green for 1 second
drone.led().clear()                               # Turns off all LEDs

period defines the duration of a single animation cycle. duration defines the total runtime of the animation effect. For example, led.rainbow(period=2.0, duration=5.0) means one full color cycle takes 2 seconds, and the effect will play for a total of 5 seconds.

Animation Methods:

Method	Arguments and Descriptions
`rainbow(period, brightness, duration)`	`period` is a continuous rainbow cycle (default: 2.0)
`blink(r, g, b, period, brightness, duration)`	`period` flashes a specific color (default: 1.0)
`solid_color(r, g, b, brightness, duration)`	Fills the entire strip with one color
`clear()`	Turns off all LEDs

Direct Control¶

Direct control allows you to set a single color for the entire strip simultaneously.

# Fill the entire strip
drone.led().fill(255, 255, 0)  # yellow

To achieve more complex patterns, you can use per-pixel control. This requires creating an array where each element represents the color of a specific LED.

Attention

When using per-pixel control, the number of elements in your color array must exactly match the total number of LEDs in the strip.

count = drone.led().led_count   # Get the total number of LEDs in the strip
leds = [(0, 0, 0)] * count      # Set all LEDs to off
leds[4] = (0, 255, 0)           # Set the 5th LED to green

# Format: [(r, g, b), ...]
drone.led().send_frame(leds, brightness=0.5)

Each element in the leds list specifies an individual LED’s color using the (r, g, b) format.

Python uses zero-based indexing, so leds[4] refers to the fifth LED on the strip.

Example: Demonstrating Effects¶

In this example, the program executes several LED effects in sequence: a rainbow animation, a blinking effect, and a three-color transition.

import time
from clover2 import Clover2

drone = Clover2()

drone.led().rainbow(period=2.0, duration=5.0)
time.sleep(5.5)

drone.led().blink(255, 255, 255, period=0.5, duration=5.0)
time.sleep(5.5)

for r, g, b in [(255, 0, 0), (0, 255, 0), (0, 0, 255)]:
    drone.led().solid_color(r, g, b, duration=1.0)
    time.sleep(1.2)

drone.led().clear()

The duration=5.0 parameter defines how long the animation plays. The time.sleep(5.5) pauses the script to ensure the animation completes before the program moves to the next command.

After the final color transition is complete, the program calls clear() to turn off all LEDs.