LED Brightness

  • I have Hyperion up and running, and it works great! I had a little bit of an issue with the capture device not showing as an option when going through the configuration, but that was resolved with a simple reboot.


    I am testing 2 different solutions for lighting, Hyperion and another called "Aurora Ambient Lighting". Aurora works fairly well, especially when taking into consideration that it is fairly new to the scene. It does not possess the finesse and polish of Hyperion, but what it does, it does well. Almost. The only issue I have with it is that there is a noticeable delay between what is on the screen, and what the LEDs are show. The LEDs are about 5-8 frames behind the video. It may be marginal, but it is something that I easily notice.


    Hyperion has some latency/delay to it as well, however, it does a much better job at covering it up. I assume that it is the smoothing feature that performs that magic act. ?


    Both Aurora and Hyperion are set up to use the same Pi 4, and I just swap SD cards back and forth as I test out both solutions. Everything else stays exactly the same.


    So, with all of that said, here is my question: The brightness level of Hyperion seems to be roughly 1/2 of what I am getting with Aurora. The LEDs are quite dim with Hyperion in comparison to Aurora. They color does not appear to be as vibrant either. It looks 'muted', for lack of a better term.


    At first I thought it was the LED type being set incorrectly. I was following a YT tutorial on Hyperion, and set the values as were recommended:

    • LED Controller
      • Controller Type: ws281x
        • I am using ws2812b LEDs, so this setting seemed logical to me
      • LED Byte Order: GRB
        • Now this did not seem logical to me at all...considering that Aurora sends the bytes as RGB to the Neopixel library. But, I followed the steps exactly, knowing I can switch it to RGB if the colors were incorrect.
      • LED Count: 300
      • GPIO Number: Default (18)
      • DMA Channel: Default (5)
      • PWM Channel: Default (0)
    • LED Layout
      • Top/Bottom/Left/Right: I set these to the proper number of LEDs I have (95,95,55,55)
      • I adjusted the Input Position to match my setup, which is with the #1 LED at the bottom left going clockwise (if looking at the front of the display)

    There were other changes that related to API access and such, but I don't think that would be causing the coloring issue, so I will leave it out.


    So I made the changes noted above, opened up the app on my cell phone and connected it to the Hyperion install without issue. I can move the selector on the color wheel around and the lights on the LEDs match (which really confused me due to the LED byte order). So I went back into Hyperion and finished up the configuration by setting up the Capturing hardware. I disabled platform capture, enabled USB capture, and selected the USB Video device and Camera 1,

    • Disable Platform Capture
    • Enable USB Capture
    • Device: USB Video (I don't recall the exact wording)
    • Input: Camera 1
    • Video Standard: NTSC
    • Device Resolution: 720x480
    • Frames per second: 30
    • Size Decimation: 4
      • I have no idea what this is and it very well may be why I am experiencing low brightness on the LEDs.

    I fired up my Amazon Fire TV and started streaming content. The LEDs kick into gear and the colors are matching the screen almost perfectly. The response of the LEDs is spot on. But, it is dim. Not so dim that I can't see it, but dim enough that if I had the lights on in my living room the LEDs would be very difficult to see.


    This is how my setup is wired:

    fN3MZPH.png


    Just to reiterate: I do not think that it is a wiring issue seeing that they are brighter when I swap SD cards and boot the Aurora Ambient Lighting installation. I am sure it has something to do with the configuration of Hyperion, I just don't know what to change. It looks like brightness is already set to 100% when I poke around through the various configuration pages, so I am at a loss. Which is why I am posing here :)


    Anyone have any thoughts? Ideas? I am just starting to play around, and it is quite possibly that my 'newbie' status has me overlooking something that is probably extremely obvious.

  • TPmodding

    Hat das Thema freigeschaltet.
  • did you found any solutions?

    i got the same kind of problem. Compared with effects light rainbow swirl the brightness of the capture device from my monitor (GC) doesnt seem as bright as the effect.


    especially with a kinda same background image as a test for the capture brightness.

  • I just don't know what to change.

    if you can change NTSC to PAL ( NTSC has old nickname, never the same colours)

    NTSC is american format, PAL is european.

    try to run diffrent encoding, YUYV to MJPEG or something.

    sometimes help/



    then set level of brightness at 100%

    try these settings



    Turn gamma to higher than 2.3 ( it will darken the colours/ flats out the whites)


    also i would recommend > if i see your hardware setup then everything looks good, however i would use more than 1 GND PIN on the raspi.

    this ensures the flow of current from the strip.

  • What about someone without any splitter or usb grabber?

    i used the display capture as a source and there seems to be a problem with the brightness, because every color, even a single led is more bright in the effect mode, than the captured colors.

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