I finally scrounged up time to update the project details with just about everything I have written about it in my notes and elsewhere. So you can read that if you have more than a few minutes to waste. It's pretty long, with a lot of poetic waxing.

What this also means is that I can, hopefully, get started on implementing improved color rendition before the contest is over. Just a short few days, but maybe I can do it. I'll keep you all informed as I go.

First, Hackaday actually had an article about two months ago about using HSV for nice fades. That's basically what I'm already doing here since I started at HSV, given that the whole idea is that we're talking about color and heading both as angles around a circle.

Now, where it gets more interesting is in this Hackaday article where we learn about gamma. In short, our eyes are more sensitive to changes when the LED is dim versus when the LED is bright. That is more or less easy to account for, at least if your microcontroller can do the math (just one math -- the math, in fact). But it also turns out that the function that would account for this peculiarity of human vision would need to be a little different for each of the three colors in our RGB LED. This can be noticeable when we're dealing with colors, especially when we want them to represent something specific, like compass heading.

So to not bog down my eight-bit Arduino to a crawl (I already have it -- unnecessarily -- running floating point math to smooth things out), I might just do this as a lookup table. It seems like a cop out, but as far as I can tell it's the way it's done in the real world because it's efficient and effective.