Re: [PATCH v5 1/4] leds: core: add generic support for RGB Color LED's

[Heiner Kallweit]

On Wed, Mar 30, 2016 at 3:03 PM, Pavel Machek <pavel@xxxxxx> wrote:
> Hi!
>
>> >Ok, so:
>> >
>> >a) Do we want RGB leds to be handled by existing subsystem, or do we
>> >need separate layer on top of that?
>> >
>> >b) Does RGB make sense, or HSV? RGB is quite widely used in graphics,
>> >and it is what hardware implements. (But we'd need to do gamma
>> >correction).
>> >
>> >c) My hardware has "acceleration engine", LED is independend from
>> >CPU. That's rather big deal. Does yours? It seems to be quite common,
>> >at least in cellphones.
>> >
>> >Ideally, I'd like to have "triggers", but different ones. As in: if
>> >charging, do yellow " .xX" pattern. If fully charged, do green steady
>> >light. If message is waiting, do blue " x x" pattern. If none of
>> >above, do slow white blinking. (Plus priorities of events). But that's
>> >quite different from existing support...)
>>
>> Please note that HSV colour scheme allows to neatly project monochrome
>> brightness semantics on the RGB realm. I.e. you can have fixed
>> hue and saturation, and by changing the brightness component a perceived
>> colour intensity can be altered.
>
> I see HSV has some advantages. But we already have LEDs with multiple
> colors, and kernel already handles them:
>
> pavel@duo:~$ ls -1 /sys/class/leds/
> tpacpi:green:batt
> tpacpi:orange:batt
>
> This is physically 2 leds but hidden under one indicator, so you got
> "off", "green", "orange" and "green+orange".

That's a good example. As long as you can recognize green+orange as
separate lights/colors
(w/o magnifying glass) I wouldn't call it "a LED with multiple colors"
but "multiple
LED devices".

In my use case we talk about RGB LEDs like the commonly used 5050 SMD RGB LEDs.
And it's not only about using a handful of discrete colors but about
displaying any arbitrary
color.
So far the kernel exposes the physical RGB LEDs as separate LEDs only
and I can't use
a trigger to e.g. set "magenta with 50% brightness".

Heiner

>                                                                         Pavel
> --
> (english) http://www.livejournal.com/~pavelmachek
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