Like the big man said. USB will be replacing the GPIO.
I was in the same boat as you and bought my first Arduino for precisely that purpose. You can use the RPi as a bridge also, just a bit overkill. If you’re that far along should be easy enough either way.
Which Arduino is suggested? There are just too many of them 
And by USB Solution, is there no soldering required except for the stripes on the corners? But how are they connected to the arduino?
Sorry, if its not the right thread or even forum for these questions. I stop asking, if it is.
greetings,
Thomas
This is certainly the most appropriate thread on the forum: Vero4K + OSMC + Hyperion! And as you’ll have read already, there’s a fair bit of user experience on here. It’s a where I came to read before making the same migration you are.
For general hardware design choices there are Instructables galore out there and of course the Hyperion forum itself.
I personally bought an Arduino Nano R3 as a controller. But I think that was overkill and there are many cheaper boards that can serve the purpose. Teenzys etc. I have a ProMicro clone and similar that I’m getting around to testing instead. Those kind of boards are just a few quid on eBay!
All of the suitable ones will allow serial over USB to connect to the Vero4K. They will have GPIO pins for connecting the lights as you did with the RPi.
Hi
I am a newbie with no soldering experience or programming experience. When I did my Hyperion project all was pretty smooth with help from everybody on this forum and guides from other forums for the choice of Led, assembly etc… Actually the Arduino was so easy …no issue at all doing the programming and setup. I am using Arduino uno r3
My biggest problem in the end was with this type of corner connectors.
I thinking I was pretty unlucky…out of 10 in the bag from Amazon only five did work…I was a bit surprised. Of course this I could only debug using a Tester doing the assembly of the Led string.
Take home lesson: A tester is mandatory to trouble shoot and verify the Led string.
But as stated before in the end it was easy.
Now I will change my Led string because I am not happy at all with the white level of ws2812b.
Cheers
You are going to have to solder jumper wires, those corners never work without a dab of solder on them anyway. Take some small gauge wire and cut then into 1" strips. Take a tiny bit of insulation off on both sides and make sure you tin the wires first. Use the right kind of solder. Stay in the low temps, I don’t do F but I would say 380-400 quickly will do it. Also, tin the copper connections on the LED strips first. Don’t burn them off.
Make sure you are following the line on your strip. On my second TV with hyperion, I accidentally mounted the strip upside down on my TV so I had to use the reverse direction button when configuring hyperion.ng
What is it about soldering that you are having a hard time with and maybe I can be of service?
Again, make sure you ground your LED’s to the PSU as well as the Arduino. Use negative for ground at the end of your strip and feed a little more voltage in the +, ignore the control wire. I use 3 wire strips. I like the 5v ones, they work great. I run about 280 LED’s on my living room TV and 160 on the TV in my bedroom. No issues except having to push the LED button off and on again sometimes when hyperion doesn’t turn itself back on after I come back from a long screensaver delay or a reboot. Little bug I noticed. Just have to turn it off and back on again.
If you aren’t happy with the white level of your ws2812b lights, which is what I use, you need to feed more voltage into the middle and end of the strip from the PSU. Simple. Also, make sure you do the math and make sure you have enough amps. Even though it’s DC, it will still throw your breaker, I have done it twice now.
Lowering your brightness to 80& and brightness compensation to 70% will also help. Colored back light off and I like my Backlight threshold set to 10-15%.
If you are having an issue with whites, it’s not the LED’s I promise you that.
I apologize if this was posted twice, I had an issue with my email so I am not sure if was posted twice and this is not the correct channel for hyperion issues. These questions should be directed towards the people that created and update hyperion.ng on github or their own community for help, etc.
Mine were a bit pink at full whack when I bought them. To get a cool white I had to tone them down quite a bit on the red channel, which cut the overall brightness significantly.
When I upgrade my TV and have to buy a greater length of tape I intend to get more LEDs/cm, so the impact isn’t as great (working on the assumption that I will need to balance out a hot R, G or B channel with those too - inenvitable I expect - but if anyone can recommend a well balanced brand it would be good to know
You make some interesting points there. I’m only running about 96 pieces of WS2801 with a common ring/rail at both ends. Ample PSU, purchased after the calculations.
Wouldn’t expect a great drop to justify a rail at the mid-point, but the experiment would do no harm prior to my upgrade.
I only mess with the gamma settings, I don’t even change the color settings very much. They are pretty accurate out of the box.
I do however have a 3% edge gap and I go 4% vertical and 6% horizontal for depth.
I make sure that #1 in the middle by subtracting the top and bottom together, should be a large negative number, at least in my case.
I adjusted the capture size to 64x64, leave the frequency at 10 but I did change smoothing to 20hz from 25 and sped it up to 150ms.
One of the easiest ways to get the colors correctly is by adjusting your depth so you are not capturing faces or it going too deep into the video to produce that color. If you start adjusting colors, the range of everything gets very muted. 1.4R. 1.2G and 1.5B for gamma settings are about all I do.
Sometimes I go to the white balance and change it to 255,235,255.
Also, you need your sketch on your Arduino to say GRB and then change it RGB on hyperion and 115200 is the best speed for Adalight.
This link is my backup .json file for hyperion.ng (I just posted it on MediaFire), it’s safe.
Settings will need tweaking but I find this to be pretty good. Also, Jeopardy is a great show if you want to play configuration while watching TV. Lots of color
On my big TV, I add 5v in the middle (55"). On my smaller 43" I just add 5v at the end. You will see improvement tenfold. Also just turning down the brightness helps, draws less current. Those suckers draw a ton of amps.
If I can find it, I can post up the custom sketch I am using on both of my R3s. I use #6 for my control wire and I believe there are 3 grounds on that sucker. I am pretty good at soldering so I just make it nice and neat with shrink wrap and make my own little “T” if you will.
Those connectors for corners will never work unless you actually solder them which defeats the purpose except they look nicer. I put a nice bend on my 3 lead wires per corner and use black wire so looks pretty good in my opinion. Try using the correct solder for microprocessors and use a very very fine tip, don’t go overboard on flux, you really don’t need it in this application. Tip tinner makes the job easier for me.
These ones are the best I have found.
Black PCB 16.4ft 300leds Non-waterproof
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B06XNJSKXN/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1
I don’t use the connectors, cut the extra crap off the other end (green wire). The tape kind of sucks but it does hold if you don’t have to re-do it. I made a chalk line on my TV to keep it straight as I am sticking them on. I go in about 1.5". For my bedroom TV, I taped the PSU directly to the back of the TV lol
@Peter_1969 Can only second @Numiah here. After having trouble with the flexible connectors recommended in the Hyperion tutorial because they actually punch holes into your stripe
I went with these instead
which use a far less destructive method of connection and offer a 90 degrees duct right away. No need for soldering.
I soldered wires between the ends of mine, so that I could overlap the tapes at the corner. This avoided a gap on the corners with no LED, for what it’s worth.
Just a quick feedback: Since my old OSMC setup has been causing problems the last weeks (sporadic Sad Face Reboots, Freezes), I reinstalled the system and used the installer from hissingshark for hyperion. And what should I say… Everything is running fine, without any problems. Vero4k+ & PhilipsHue … You can’t make it any easier than this! Thank you @hissingshark! Excellent work!
Can anybody please post a working config for hyperion on vero4k and a hue bridge? I installed with @hissingshark s installer but the leds never turn on. I get no error except for “no carrier”, so i think my config for the framegrappe/amlgrabber is wrong, but i can’ find a complete example. Thanks in advance.
Here is my config for the grabber part:
"amlgrabber" :
{
"width" : 64,
"height" : 64,
"frequency_Hz" : 3.0,
"priority" : 890
},
"framegrabber": {
"frequency_Hz": 10,
"height": 45,
"pixelDecimation": 8,
"type": "amlogic",
"width": 80
},“No carrier” is seemingly normal. I think it eventually sounded like a QT thing going on in the background but it wasn’t very easy to Google for.
I don’t think people need to be sharing config files any more because with NG we aren’t suppose ot edit them. All configuration should work through the webGUI on port 8090.
To be clear, you built the experimental version with Hue support?
That’s built using:
sudo ./install hue
Yes. I can configure via gui, lamps are working via gui. But nothing is turned on when running kodi. It’s on a vero4k, so I guess it’s something with the grabbing stuff.
I thought the second grabber is not configurable via gui?
Edit:
Looks like grabbing works fine, as i can view the preview in the Web-GUI. Why do the Leds do not turn on/change color?
I take it you are testing them in the Remote Control section?
For them to respond to the grabber you would need “Platform Capture: (AmLogic)” to be marked in green as “Source active” under Remote Control->Source Selection. It might not be if you’ve tried setting colours or effects prior.
No sorry, i was talking just about the identifying the lamps and turning them simply blue.
But nevertheless, i got it working now. I did use “phillips hue” as led type, which i did not manage to get work. But i got them working via “phillips hue entertainment” type.
Thank you very much, @hissingshark . The installation was a charm, i wouldn’t have managed it without you installer. I just struggled at configuration. Sorry.
Not a problem. That’s what we do here. It’ll be useful to the next user!
