palettes

🎨 palettes

A lightweight, pure-Python color palette and UI theme engine for microcontrollers, embedded displays, desktop Python, and the browser.

📦 MIP: palettes 🐍 PyPI: pydevices-palettes ⚡ Zero C Dependencies 🌐 MicroPython · CircuitPython · CPython · Direct WebAssembly · Pyodide

🌈 Color Wheels

Generate continuous color ramps and rainbow gradients with configurable saturation and hue lengths.

🎯 Material Design

Access standardized semantic UI palettes with shades from 50 to 900 for modern themes and widgets.

🧊 Color Cubes

Evenly distributed 8, 27, 64, and 125 color spaces optimized for dithering and quantized graphics.

🔄 Byte-Swapping

First-class 16-bit RGB565 byte swapping (swapped=True) for direct SPI panel compatibility.

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🚀 Quick Install

MicroPython (MIP)CPython (TestPyPI)CircuitPythonPyScript / Pyodide

import mip
mip.install("palettes", index="https://PyDevices.github.io/mip")

pip install -i https://test.pypi.org/simple/ \
  --extra-index-url https://pypi.org/simple/ pydevices-palettes

Copy the palettes/ folder from the repository into your board's CIRCUITPY/lib/ folder.

In PyScript headers or Pyodide configurations, declare:

import micropip
await micropip.install(
    "pydevices-palettes", index_urls="https://test.pypi.org/simple/"
)

from palettes import get_palette

The wheel is named pydevices-palettes; the module you import is palettes. On MicroPython the MIP package name is palettes (mip.install("palettes", index="https://PyDevices.github.io/mip")).

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💻 Live Interactive Demo

Try tweaking the palette parameters below. Click ▶ Run to execute the code with direct MicroPython WebAssembly:

from palettes import get_palette from displaydev.auto import AutoDisplay # Initialize display canvas (320x240) display = AutoDisplay(width=320, height=240, canvas_id=CANVAS_ID) display.fill(0x1082) # Generate a 256-color wheel palette palette = get_palette("wheel", color_depth=16, length=256, saturation=1.0) # Draw vertical color bars bar_width = display.width // 32 for i in range(32): color = palette[i * 8] display.fill_rect(i * bar_width, 20, bar_width, 100, color) # Material Design amber ramp md = get_palette("material_design", color_depth=16) shades = [ md.AMBER_S50, md.AMBER_S100, md.AMBER_S200, md.AMBER_S300, md.AMBER_S400, md.AMBER_S500, md.AMBER_S600, md.AMBER_S700, md.AMBER_S800, md.AMBER_S900 ] for i, color in enumerate(shades): display.fill_rect(i * 30 + 10, 140, 26, 60, color) display.show() print("Drawn 32 color wheel bands and 10 Material Design amber shades!")

▶ Run ↺ Reset Initializing Python…

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📖 Practical Usage Pattern

Construct a palette once and index it inside your application draw loop:

from palettes import get_palette

# Match the display's native color depth (16-bit RGB565)
palette = get_palette(name="wheel", color_depth=16, length=256, saturation=1.0)

# Index directly into the palette
for i in range(16):
    display_drv.fill_rect(0, i * 8, 80, 8, palette[i * 16])

If the physical display expects byte-swapped 16-bit values (common on SPI TFTs like the ST7789 or ILI9341), pass swapped=True:

palette = get_palette(name="wheel", color_depth=16, swapped=True)

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🎮 Featured Browser Demos

Explore full-color gradient and animation applications built with palettes:

🎨 Palettes Gallery Showcase

Interactive color visualizer exploring Material Design tokens, HSV wheels, and RGB cubes.

▶ Launch Live Demo

🪶 Rainbow Feathers

Geometric generative art rendering smooth multi-chromatic feather curves.

▶ Launch Live Demo

🔄 Palette Rotations

Real-time palette cycling and rotational sweeps demonstrating zero-cost animations.

▶ Launch Live Demo

📜 Gradient Scrolling

Hardware vertical scrolling demonstration paired with high-precision palette shading.

▶ Launch Live Demo

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📚 Documentation Map

• 🎨 Palette Gallery — Visual previews and tables for Wheel, Material Design, Cube, and Win16 palettes.
• 🔢 Color Math & Formats — RGB565 bit-packing, endianness swapping, and HSL/HSV math.
• 🧩 Integrations — Recipes for pygraphics, pdwidgets, and hardware display drivers.
• 📚 API Reference — Complete docstrings and class references.