“Breathing” Sleep LED

I always have loved Apple and their non-jerky, fluid like GUI in all of their OS’s. Then I noticed it even with their hardware when I got my MacBook Pro over 3 years ago. My older PC’s always had a flashing sleep LED. That was fine until I saw the “breathing” LED pattern that Apple did on the Mac products. Much nicer. 🙂 I saw these awesome cufflinks with the same “breathing” pattern, and got inspired to write a little Arduino sketch to replicate it. So I did.

LED to pin 11, that all.

This is a really simple sketch, only one thing I did was vary the timing in the fade to smooth out the take off and landing. You will see that in all of the if statements inside the dimming function.

You can download the sketch here.

14 thoughts on ““Breathing” Sleep LED

  1. Pingback: “Breathing” Sleep LED – Arduino cufflinks :) « adafruit industries blog

  2. What is it with you Apple users that make you totally unaware of the rest of the world?
    Pulsing LEDs have been around forever but as soon as Apple implement them you are all “Oh my god, they are the coolest thing!!”

    • I am aware that there were pulsing/fading LED’s long before Apple put them into Macs, but I had never seen them in PC’s prior to that, that’s all. I was PC IT for 5 years before I switched to Mac, and had never seen anything like that.

  3. It’s not really about mac or pc. It’s just a new way to implement old technology. Ferrari didn’t reinvent the wheel or the combustion engine. But there’s no denying it’s beauty and elegance.

  4. Pingback: Electronics-Lab.com Blog » Blog Archive » “Breathing” Sleep LED – Arduino cufflinks :)

  5. Pingback: blog.flo.cx » Non-blocking breathing led for arduino…

  6. Pingback: Speed control, part II « Atmospheric Front

  7. the more efficient way to implement the same sketch could have been using the mod function instead of repeating the same if again and again.

    Nice resource still! Thanks

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