WS2801 Lights periodically turn on and off

  • I am running Hyperion on a Raspberry Pi 0, connected to WS2801 LED light strip. My USB grabber has the UTVF007 chipset.


    I am using Hypercon 1.03.04 and moved the new hyperion-v4l2 to the Pi. I am able to take grabber screenshots, and the LED lights seem to correspond correctly to the image on screen.


    However, the lights keep turning on and off periodically - they never stay on like I've seen in everyone else's builds. I have attached the video in a zip file (since I was not able to find out how to upload it myself, sorry).


    Please let me know if you need the log or config file.


  • These are the logs. I have also attached the config file.

  • I had the very same problem with a Pi 0. With my Pi 4 everything is great.
    What worked for me: force the resolution of the grabber to 640x480 or lower in Hypercon. With that it was stable for me.
    Apparently the USB bandwidth of the Pi 0 is not large enough for the standard 720x480 resolution.

  • That worked, thank you so much! Just for my own curiosity, how did you find that out / debug the issue?


    With a lot of testing and trying. My first assumption was that something is wrong with the power supply. So I tried a variety of powered and non-powered USB hubs and also different OTG adapters. Nothing worked. Then I got a Raspberry Pi 4 and tested with that - worked immediately without touching any settings. I then read through a lot of posts in the different Raspberry boards. And while I read a lot that the Pi Zero per se is fast enough (confirmed by looking at CPU usage), I read the hint about the USB bandwidth in another context. So I tried settings that might lower the amount of data to be transferred by the capture stick. In the end it turned out (that’s now my understanding - might still be wrong) that a change in resolution is actually passed on to the stick and reduces the captured image before it is actually passed on via USB (in contrast to the image reduction settings in Hyperion that in my understanding rather serve to lower the CPU load.

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