Completely confused with all of the install options available- Would it make any since to use a RPi 4 and an Arduino nano together?- Using with retropie arcade cabinet

Hello all,

I hope you all can help me understand all of this as I'm a little confused.

My goal is to get an installation of hyperion running as cheap as possible- possibly with components I already have laying around in a perfect world.

Another goal I have is good performance.

I also would like to stay away from wifi communication-- as I don't want to clog my network.

I have esp8266, esp32, arduino nano all available.

A raspberry pi4 is running the emulator frontend retropie and will be providing the display information.--> I'm understanding a capture card will be necessary no matter what because of this, am I correct?

I guess what I am trying to figure out is, can I run hyperion on the raspberry pi 4 and use another piece of hardware to take the "load" off of the pi. Or that is not how it works at all.

Can I make this happen with the constraints stated and options given above?

Thank you all for giving me some guidance on this!!

TPmodding. Thank you so much for replying and giving me this information.

I ended up getting a capture card and seem to have everything working (including the middleman arduino).

I do have one question-- and maybe this is by design. When capturing from the screen. The first led bank (from chip #1) is not lighting up. It works fine when doing effects etc.

I am using FCOB Leds (36 leds to 1 chip- 2811)

Is this as designed? If not, can you give me some guidance on how to correct this on my end?

Thank you!!

Also, if I will not see any performance reduction, can you give me some guidance on how to change from using the capture card as I have to the simpler method. I have wires all over the place with this method and if the performance won't suffer while using retropie- I think I need to simplify this to remove break down points.

Thank you so much TPmodding. Thank you for being helpful.