New Ambient Lighting system - no knowledge (4 Viewers)

[Rick164]

Couldn't find any detailed explanation of it, it just changes the total led calculations and positions afaik.

 

[The_Stig]

You can also try a lower rate (currently 1200000), it should be fine at that but some have it at 1000000.

Why is the bitrate important for this?

 

[edsche]

Couldn't find any detailed explanation of it, it just changes the total led calculations and positions afaik.

Thanks, I just enable it and see then if something has changed

 

[The_Stig]

Couldn't find any detailed explanation of it, it just changes the total led calculations and positions afaik.

This is one of the points, that is quite clear to me:

LEDs in corners:
xxxxxxx
x.........x
x.........x
xxxxxxx

Makes a different calculation to how/what colours are shown as without LEDs in corners (not only the amount of LEDs):

.xxxxxxx.
x...........x
x...........x
.xxxxxxx.

 

[Rick164]

Basically its the SPI rate at which you drive the leds, the higher the frequency the faster updates (FPS / smoothness) it gets.
However if you have many leds the higher frequency can cause issues because the leds can't keep up, someone did a comparison for my APA102 144 led setup and came down to 1200000 as any higher would cause flickering / stability issues.

 

[The_Stig]

Ok...I only have 186 LEDs in total...so will play around with it this evening...

 

[The_Stig]

By the way: didn't add a resistor since it did not work when I added it to the data line. LEDs got white then and couldn't control it. How important is it?

And what are your settings for horizontal and vertical depth? I am still not 100% with my setup.

 

[azzuro]

for me the resistance is only needed fo WS2812B chip, maybe due to the 1 wire for data and clock.

 

[The_Stig]

Still optimizing and having quite a few problems: sometimes after running a while the ambilight is a few seconds off sync to TV-picture. Its only happening sometimes, not always. Is this a common issue and would logs help? I mean is this even logged?

 

[Rick164]

Could be network related, do you have the rPI wired to a gigabit network?

Shouldn't happen though as I have had it running for a long time now without issues (both rPi+OpenElec and now rPi2+Raspian), connection drops are logged in the Mediaportal-error.log but best to set the logging to debug in the Mediaportal configuration to get some more info if it has it.
Frame drops I believe we don't log as they could potentially flood the logs.

When it happens you could run a ping test on both the HTPC and rPI device and see if it has packet loss at that time, on the rPI you could also ping something in your local network constantly like this:

- SSH to your rPi box
- Execute command: ping <machine address>
- Leave the SSH session running and open in the background
- When AmbiLight error occurs open the SSH window and do a Ctrl+C , you will see a total packet count and packet loss.

Since it only happens sometimes I don't expect it to be a Hyperion issue but could check the CPU load on the Windows machine (and maybe rPI just in case) and to see if it's too high now and again.