Arduino Hyperion/Boblight LED-Controller

Arduino sketch to control three wire RGB-LED strips (e.g. WS2812, WS2811) with serial data received from a Boblight server running e.g. on OpenELEC/Kodi.

I'm using this with a short WS2812b strip (30 LEDs), a Arduino Nano (ATmega328p) and Hyperion server/client running on LibreELEC (7.x) using Kodi (former XBMC) - and it works fine so far.

You'll need the FastLED library for Arduino.

Also Hyperion or Boblight are needed to be configured separately.

For more (and much better) information what this is all about, I recommend reading this really excellent article on Tweaking4All.com: http://www.tweaking4all.com/home-theatre/xbmc/xbmc-boblight-openelec-ws2811-ws2812/

Hyperion configuration

The device configuration in hyperion.config.json should look something like this:

"device" :
{
	"name"       : "adaino",
	"type"       : "adalight",
	"output"     : "/dev/ttyUSB0",
	"rate"     : 115200,
	"delayAfterConnect"     : 0,
	"colorOrder" : "rgb"
}

• The name doesn't really matter
• Select adalight for type.
• output needs to match the (USB) port the Arduino is connected to
• Rate has to match the SERIAL_RATE setting in the sketch.
• colorOrder may be set here or in the sketch (COLOR_ORDER).
• There is no need to set a prefix (the sketch will derive it from the number of LEDs).

Boblight configuration

The device configuration in the boblight.conf should look similar to this:

[device]
name            adaino
type            momo
output          /dev/ttyUSB0
channels        90
prefix          41 64 61 00 1D 48
interval        20000
rate            115200
debug           off
delayafteropen  1000000

• The name doesn't really matter
• type should be set to momo
• output needs to match the (USB) port the Arduino is connected to
• The value of channels is three times the number of the LEDs (30 LEDs --> 90 channels).
• The prefix needs to be set according to the provided script/list. Another way would be to set a static prefix in the sketch and use the same one here.

Powersaving

This function puts the Arduino's ATmega328 to sleep after some idle time. This should save some power for setups where the USB standby power can't/shouldn't be switched off and you don't want to cut the power for the system entirely.

For this, you also have to modify the circuitry: There needs to be a connection between RX (pin #0) and on of the interrupt pins (I used pin #2 and a 220 ohm resistor). This way the Arduino will wake up as soon as it receives serial data again. Also a SMD capacitor that connects the reset line to the USB-to-Serial chip needs to be removed for this setup to make sense. Otherwise the Arduino will reset instead of just waking up (which is some kind of wakeup, too - I guess - but I didn't tested that).

You can find some more info on this topic here: http://donalmorrissey.blogspot.de/2010/04/sleeping-arduino-part-3-wake-up-via.html