Hey guys!
Total noob question here, but I was wondering if anyone could tell me the difference with a monome having varibright and one that doesn’t. What does that exactly mean and why would someone prefer that one over the other?
Thank you for your patience haha!
Dan
varibright can display a range (16 levels for most) of brightnesses per LED. this allows for more dynamic visuals where previously each LED was either on or off.
Awesome, thanks for clarifying that for me!
This video shows the difference pretty well
What is the number of varibright levels on the current model of grids?
16 levels of varibright
Since this topic was bumped up and I couldn’t figure out a better one: I suppose eg. most Norns scripts and other modern grid-capable thingies (Ansible) specifically want a 16-level varibright, but do many scripts actually use most of the 16 brightness levels, or just a subset of those?
This is obviously something that’s quite hard to grok without going deeper into specific scripts, I just wonder if anyone has taken note of how many different levels some of their fave scripts are actually using.
(Asking because I’ve got a silly DIY project idea lined up…)
You’re right that it depends on which scripts you’re looking at - anecdotally, I don’t think I’ve seen any that use all 16 levels of brightness. You might be able to get a better idea by doing a ctrl+f over a couple of scripts looking for instances of g.led(). That method sets the brightness of an led at position x and y.
Grid API docs are here
Thanks, good point - I guess a recursive grep or ctrl+f is in order 
(I was mainly wondering whether most scripts would actually use every other brightness value or less than that - or something like that - will have to go through some obvious / favourite ones and put down my findings.)
unsure if it’s in your scope, but fwiw, the varibright template for cheat codes uses 0,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,12,15. some of the variance is unnecessary – most scripts could map pretty well to 4-step varibright, but its nice to have the option for “meta action” gradients where the brightness shifts just slightly depending on if a modifier key is held, etc.
led map section is here: cheat_codes_2/cheat_codes_2.lua at main · dndrks/cheat_codes_2 · GitHub
Great Yes, cheat codes would definitely be one of the interesting ones!
I guess the main thing I’m planning to find out is, whether by pure accident or luck, there’s eg. a set of 8 or 10 “significant steps” that people use, that absolutely need to be coded with different intensities or colors for the grid UI to make sense. So I could sort of, quantize 16 step varibright serial output from Norns to a rougher display scale, just for the sake of trying something out, and still being able to make sense of the output.
(Sorry for being somewhat vague, it’s a silly and probably not super interesting idea that came to my mind the other day…)