milight | Reverse engineering MiLight

LEDs are rather large so your eye can easily identify only the R and B being on for example, so we see a red and a blue light source. A monitor pixel is so small that our brain sees the R and B as magenta instead.

You can read about here on Wikipedia.

I figured out what was wrong.

First I noticed that request are not exactly the same between CW bulb and WW bulb. For example, the request you have to send to switch on the light with CW bulb is :

Since you are pretty new to C++, the right answer is this:

Don't use char*. Try to avoid pointers at all and if you have to use them, use pointer classes like unique_ptr. One simple reason, for example, is that you have to manage memory if those pointers don't simply point at some other variables that exist within some scope. Thus, memory leaks are quite easy to produce if you use pointers. (That said, you can use pointers, but usually you do this in some controlled environment, like wrapped within some class, like a linked list class, or in a very small scope in which you need polymorphy - although again, in such a case you could use unique_ptr or shared_ptr)

Pointers that are essentially arrays like the typically used char* should be replaced by something that wraps arrays. In this case, clearly std::string, which can be used just like char*. In other cases, for example instead of int* or int[] arrays, you'd use std::vector.

Now, you have some function from outside that you need for SQL, that's ok, but try to limit the time in which something stays a char*. Transform char* to string simply by putting it in the constructor: std::string my_string(functions_that_returns_char());, then compare simply by string_1 == string_2. You can access single letters as usual by my_string[some_index]. Take a look yourself for more functionality:

http://www.cplusplus.com/reference/string/string/

That said, I can only second the comment from Baum mit Augen, get a book or read through some tutorials. And be aware that C-style is totally not C++-style, C-programmers will use pointers a lot, for instance.

As for your original question, a pointer that is essentially an array points to the first element of that array. Dereferencing produces that element, not the array. No need to use a pointer here anyway if you could simply directly use the actual array, right?