[DIY] Amblight project/guide - Hyperion - WS2801/ WS2812B / APA102 (3 Viewers)

[Gradlock]

Hmmm, I don't think the Pi has enough power for that many lights. Depending on your version of the Pi ( I just got a Pi 3) it can optimally use a 2.5A power supply to power the board and external USB peripherals but I don't know think it can deliver enough power for more than 25 lights without causing problems such as CPU brownouts.

On the other hand I am curious about the possibility of using the Pi to control my 2812B lights directly. I read the Adalight post and am puzzled why it has to be connected directly to the Pi's power pin along with the IC chip although it will also be receiving power from an external power supply?

 

[Gradlock]

I can't get the LEDs to light up. When it first boots up I get the red, green, blue sequence but afterwards there i nothing. I am using the video capture setup. Video grabber works fine and I have everything setup but I am getting an error that seems to indicate the Arduino is not communicating with the Pi. See the attached log. I am doing my own legwork as well. So far the first thing I checked was the baud rate which i set to the same in the hyperion config and in the Arduino sketch.

 

[Rick164]

I now want to do it from my PC to my PC monitor, which I guess will be a lot easier. My question is, do you think the Pi will power all the LED's? Or will I need external power? Total count of LED's is 150 needed (more like 145).

Totally missed your post , you will need an external power brick for the leds as your Pi can't power more than a handful for extended periods.
For 150 leds any decent 5V 10A will do

As for running directly from my PC, I think I can just use USB to Pi and run software on my PC for the coding of what's on screen right? The only problem might be I have 2 screens and I want to project from the main display.

Most of the configuration is done via network and only need to flash the SD card, for multiple display this gets trickier as I do that here but the AVR has 2 HDMI outs one for actual output and other for Hyperion capture so depends on the setup.

I can't get the LEDs to light up. When it first boots up I get the red, green, blue sequence but afterwards there i nothing. I am using the video capture setup. Video grabber works fine and I have everything setup but I am getting an error that seems to indicate the Arduino is not communicating with the Pi. See the attached log. I am doing my own legwork as well. So far the first thing I checked was the baud rate which i set to the same in the hyperion config and in the Arduino sketch.

Since the bootup swirl works the sketch seems to be working, any errors when manually starting Hyperiond process (hyperiond <your jscon config path>)?
Some time ago we got a dedicated forum where a lot of devs and users hang and try to help out, would post the problem there so more can look at it

https://hyperion-project.org/forums/software-support.10/

 

[Gradlock]

Thanks Rick. Grrr, I'm at work right now so it will be a while before I can check for any startup errors. Except for the log I don't have anything. I'll head over to the Hyperion forums though to get things started. Thanks for the guide!

UPDATE: As usual, a big oversight on my part. I was looking at the log again and it says that the output device was /dev/ACM0 which struck me as not quite right. So I took a look at the config you put your in your guide and low and behold: "/dev/ttyACM0"

Pretty sure this will fix it. Doh!

 

[Gradlock]

For anyone who is interested in the video capture solution I found a Chinese seller on eBay that sells the EazyCap with the Fuschai UTV007 chip. It's the one I bought and it works great.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/usb2-0-capt...SB2-0-Video-Adapter-with-Audio-/162162443743?.

I know there are sources listed for European sellers, this is for anyone looking for other sellers since even on Amazon there are multiple devices listed as EasyCap but have an incompatible chip.

 

[Gradlock]

Sweet! So I changed the device name in my config file as mentioned above and she started right up! Super excited about this! Then I noticed my colors were wrong. Since I am using a string of WS2812B lights connected to the Arduino, with the color order already corrected in the sketch, I assumed this was the problem so I changed the color order to from grb to rgb in the config file and restarted Hyperion...success!

Now comes the REALLY hard part....calibrating the colors to my liking. Thanks Rick!!

 

[Rick164]

Awesome, good to hear

 

[Freshage]

Hello again! I wish to move to OSMC from OpenElec, can I simply drag over my hyperion config and run through setup again? If so, what key parts do I need to go through again?

It's a fresh SD card with OSMC on it, nothing else.

Thanks

 

[Rick164]

Yep can just copy config after install

 

[Freshage]

Sweet, so install OSMC, drag over the Hyperion config folder (and all config files) to root. Done. Nice!