[DIY] Amblight project/guide - Hyperion - WS2801/ WS2812B / APA102 (5 Viewers)

[Rick164]

Recently upgraded my WS2812B setup to APA102 as others had nice results with them, this time around with 144 leds p/m as I wanted to try something new and "slightly" over the top which means it now has a total of 600 leds which nearly cover the sides of the tv (rest is for corner cable room)

It's using an rPi2 and Hyperion so no more Arduino in between as these you can just drive directly, will do a showcase in a new topic later.

Still tweaking a few things like the gamma / smoothing but here are a few videos of it below with the same settings used in WS2812 videos:

Avatar - Fire scene

Suicide Squad - trailer

 

[The_Stig]

Hey @Rick164,

thanks for this. Could you post your hyperion.config please? Would like to compare it with mine.

And another thing which I simply don't get as I want it and I see the same in your video: If you look at your suicide Squad trailer, in 0:09: there is a small green spot down/right of the screen. This come from the uniform of the Squad-Girl. But what I don't like is: the green is way too green. It should be darker. I have the same for the other colours too. Is there a way to soften this? I didn't find a good way...

 

[Rick164]

Hi Stig,

Still working on the config but attached the current one with lowered brightness thru the white levels and less intense reds, to lower specific colors you can reduce the white levels or gamma.
With the current config it's better due to the reduced brightness because it will not show very dark colors (like in the Squad girl part) and also with this many leds it was way too bright, probably gonna need to tweak the other colors a bit but for instance gray is now actually gray so getting there

To do this easily I use the Hyperion app where you can do HSV adjustments and such in real time, normally do small tweaks and watch it for a night and adjust every day until it either matches the screen or is pleasant to view.

 

[The_Stig]

To do this easily I use the Hyperion app where you can do HSV adjustments and such in real time, normally do small tweaks and watch it for a night and adjust every day until it either matches the screen or is pleasant to view.

Yeah, done this too but I didn't find a setting which was perfekt. Either the dark parts has been too bright or the brighter parts not bright enough. Will check your config. Thanks for this!

 

[The_Stig]

What setting do you have for horizontal/vertical depth? Can't see it from config (as I understand it this is in the leds section?!)

 

[Rick164]

It's created in HyperCon under the Hardware tab, kept it default for now:

8% Horizontal depth
5% Vertical depth

Before I used 12% and 7% but gonna play with that once everything is calibrated.
Usually create a new config than copy over leds section to the current config as that way you don't overwrite any other settings, it's an offset in the led section so can't set it globally.

 

[Rick164]

Btw added a new issue to the Hyperion issue tracker and they seem to have finally merged the APA102 fix that worked although can't find it in their commit log so have yet to validate that so gonna compile it manually for now and check / post it here as it contains additional fixes.

https://github.com/tvdzwan/hyperion/issues/480

// Update

Indeed works so would have to wait for a new binary release or download the latest compiled one attached and follow these instructions:

// Update 2

Binary releases have been sorted and can update using the official Hyperion installation instructions to get the same results.

- Use WinSCP and connect to your Raspberry Pi
- Navigate to /home/pi and extract all files from attached zip there
- Run the following command in the SSH session from the Rasperry Pi (Putty):

sudo mv /home/pi/gpio2spi /opt/hyperion/bin
sudo mv /home/pi/hyperiond /opt/hyperion/bin
sudo mv /home/pi/hyperion-remote /opt/hyperion/bin
sudo mv /home/pi/hyperion-v4l2 /opt/hyperion/bin

Afterwards run:

sudo chmod +x /opt/hyperion/bin/gpio2spi
sudo chmod +x /opt/hyperion/bin/hyperiond
sudo chmod +x /opt/hyperion/bin/hyperion-remote
sudo chmod +x /opt/hyperion/bin/hyperion-v4l2

Optionally:

sudo chmod -R 777 /opt/hyperion/bin

 

[Rick164]

Settled on the attached config which is more or less the same as the WS2812 one, it only has lowered brightness and gamma 2.0.

 

[Rick164]

For those who haven't updated Hyperion recently there's a good reason to do so now because there was a long standing issue with binary release updates.
When new features or bugfixes were added like the one for APA102 they wouldn't show up on binary releases because the updater script was pointing to an old release, this has now been fixed there so if you have any issues or just want the latest and greatest you can update as usual and it should now actually get the latest version
Just update it as usual:

First SSH to your Raspberry Pi and then execute these commands:

wget -N https://raw.github.com/tvdzwan/hyperion/master/bin/install_hyperion.sh
sudo sh ./install_hyperion.sh

Complete tutorial:

https://github.com/tvdzwan/hyperion/wiki/Installation

 

[josh38]

I Just created my first hyperion+rpi2+apa102 (60/m leds strip). I still have an issue always with Last led of the chain, no matter the number of leds i configure in hyperion, i always see N-1 leds correctly, and the Last led changes randomly every time. It seems that next spi transfer starts before the previous end bits of sequence are transferred. Am i the only one with these issues?