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You can setup Hyperion on a RPi and then use the Hyperion Android app. You can even link it into Tasker on your phone to automate it.
Hey thanks for the Gold! There was no need but I appreciate it. I was losing my mind trying to get this thing working so I'm happy to help somebody else out of the same predicament.
My setup is the same as yours, except I bought the cheaper LED's.
I tried a few different installation images, and I had success with this one.
I used this tool to write the installation image from my PC to the SD card.
Then I used this version of Hypercon to make the config file.
So what I would recommend is this :
1) Download that installation image and use that tool to write it to the SD card.
2) Run that version of Hypercon and choose the right number and positioning of the LED's. For comparison have a look at these images of my config :
Hardware Tab - You can see my first LED (0) is just above (like an inch) the bottom left corner as you face the TV. That is why the 1st LED offset is set to -8 (the positioning updates as you click the arrow buttons beside the LED offset value). You will need to choose APA102 instead of Lightberry from the Device Type dropdown. I don't have LED's in the corners and I'm using 42 LED's in total. I bought the 48 LED version but my 42" TV has a very small bezel and only 42 would fit. The extra 6 LED's don't light up.
Process Tab - The values shown here are what Lightberry recommend, with the exception of the HSV Saturation Gain, which I increased from 1 to 2. That makes the colours less pastel and more vibrant/solid.
Grabber Tab - This is the part that I was getting stuck on. I found the values for the GrabberV4L2 section in some forum post and they work fine for me. You will have to change the Video Standard from PAL to NTSC.
External Tab - I don't think I made any changes here. I don't use the XBMC functionality so I can't say if this is a good config or not.
SSH Tab - You can ignore this tab, I added in my details but you can't push the config file to the Pi. You can only set some colours, which I suppose is useful to see if the thing is working.
3) You should have a good config now, click the "Create Hyperion Configuration" button and save it to a file.
4) The next step is to copy it to the Pi. I work with Unix servers all day so this is the method I am familiar with. It avoids potential issues with file permissions and ownerships :
4a) Open the config file on the PC, select all and copy.
4b) SSH into the Pi (user & password is root & openelec)
4c) cat /dev/null > /storage/.config/hyperion.config.json This will wipe the current Hyperion config by filling the file with null/nothing.
4d) vi /storage/.config/hyperion.config.json This will open the config file in a (horrible and frustrating) text editor.
4e) Press the Esc key a couple of times to make sure you're not in any editing mode (you'll hear a bell sound). Then press the i key once to enter Insert mode. You should see an I at the bottom left of the SSH window.
4f) Right click your mouse in the SSH window and all the copied text from the file on your PC will be pasted into the config file.
4g) Press the Esc key a couple of times again (more bells) to make sure you have left Insert mode.
4h) Type : to enter "File mode", you should see the : at the bottom left of the SSH window. Then type wq to Write the file and Quit the editor. You might have to try wq! instead of wq if it complains about something.
5) Now you need to restart Hyperion using killall hyperion. There is a supervisor process which will see that Hyperion is not running and restart it automatically. With some luck the LED's should immediately turn off then after a short time you'll see a rainbow swirl startup sequence.
That is the procedure I followed and it got things up and running. The colours weren't great, probably because I have a yellow wall behind the TV. Tweaking the colours using Hypercon is a slow process. Instead I used this Android app and with a lot of messing around with the Gamma settings I managed to get decent colours.
Hopefully that's a clear explanation. Let me know if you get stuck anywhere.