FadeCandy with xLights

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Earl Allgood

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Sep 19, 2020, 1:58:43 PM9/19/20

to Fadecandy

Ok so for anyone that wants to know. I got my FadeCandy board to work with xLights.

I used a Raspberry Pi 3 with raspberry OS installed and installed OLA.

It works fine but you have to keep in mind that there is a pixel limit of 170 pixels per channel.

That adds up to about 56 leds per channel.

I also got it to work with a different software but that one is a bit more complicated.

I know I had hell trying to find help with this when I started, so if any one has any questions I will do my best to answer them on based my experience.

BTW, OLA is available via the standard raspbian repository (v.0.10.7 as of Jan 2020)!

here is the site i found a "how to" on installing it.

So installation is easy:

~ $ sudo apt update

~ $ sudo apt install ola

(takes about a minute!)
This installs the software, creates a user called olad (added to the dialout and plugdev groups), and sets up (and starts) OLAd as an init.d service.

So, the current status of OLAd can be checked with:

~ $ service olad status

The init.d script (/etc/init.d/olad) runs the daemon as the user olad, and with /etc/ola as the config dir.

By default, the Paspberry Pi has its SPI interface disabled, so enable it in Menu -> Preferences -> Raspberry Pi Configuration -> Interfaces (reboot not necessary?).

Also, the olad user doesn’t have access to the SPI interface, so give permission with:

~ $ grep spi: /etc/group

spi:x:999:pi

~ $ sudo adduser olad spi

Adding user `olad' to group `spi' ...

Adding user olad to group spi Done.

~ $ grep spi: /etc/group

spi:x:999:pi,olad

Then restart the daemon:

~ $ sudo service olad restart

To make life easier, give yourself permission to edit the config files (they are all owned by olad):

~ $ sudo adduser pi olad

(you’ll probably need to log out and back in again for this to take effect)

The StageProfi plugin seems to try to lock /dev/ttyUSB0 every 5 seconds, which generates a lot of log entries

- disable the plugin by editing /etc/ola/ola-stageprofi.conf

~ $ sudo nano /etc/ola/ola-stageprofi.conf

- change the second line to enabled = false

hold down ctrl and hit x

then y to save changes

then ENTER to saves changes to the same file name

then restart olad:

~ $ sudo service olad restart

At this point you should be able to access the OLA Admin page at (something like) http://your ip address:9090/