This is a bit of a tangent for the joystick project, but I hit an itch an needed to scratch it.
Once I wrote the code for moving a cursor LED around on the matrix I immediately wanted to use it to draw. In my normal higher level languages this wouldn’t have been an issue, but I didn’t realize that C++ doesn’t have a concept of array push/pop/slice natively which made the idea of tracking the “on” state for multiple LEDs in the grid a bit more difficult.
Yeah I could have brought in a library to add the push/pop/slice functionality, but this is a learning exercise for me so I wanted to figure it out without the additional library.
So, I though out a way of translating the x,y of the cursor into an integer and using that to refer to a specific index of an array to track the on/off state of all LEDs in the matrix.
I grappled with it a bit and in the end figured out a decent way of handling it (which I’m sure I could have looked up somewhere but again, I’m using this as a learning exercise).
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