I know this is fairly old, but please read the documentation. I ran into this issue, and on the current stable version (2.0.15) it states that you must run
sudo updateHyperionUser -u root
if you want to use ws281x library. I have tried numerous other outcomes and loading many different OS's while adding in Hyperion, have tried Hyperbian, and so much more. This one command should take care of it.