HyperHDR basics: do and DON'T

[awawa-dev]

I want to refer to some basic assumptions that need to be considered when creating a setup for use with HyperHDR. Unauthorized or not consulted guides have appeared on the Internet, some of which reproduce an incorrect or unsupported legacy approaches, e.g. from Hyperion NG. Below is a list of basic assumptions that you can verify that the author followed the correct way in his tutorial.

1. Remember the safety rules! If you are not comfortable with modular power supplies, use laptop power supplies. Unfortunately, the latter usually have worse parameters or are less stable. Do not modify the configuration while it is on: disconnect the power cables first. For the modular power supply, a fuse and a closed case must be used, which at the same time must be well ventilated. The performance of the power supply decreases with increasing temperature. Make sure high voltage cables are firmly attached and insulated.

2. Power your Raspberry Pi with a dedicated USB 5V power supply and USB POWER CABLE that can provide at least 2 amps. DO NOT use a shared LED power supply for this purpose. It is not stable enough for such applications. Do not connect the output voltage of the LED strip power supply (e.g. +5V) to anything other than the voltage input of the LED strip.

3. In the case of using a dedicated power supply for the Raspberry Pi and a separate one for the LED strip, provide a common ground between the LED strip ground and Raspberry Pi (or Pico/ESP32/ESP8266 if it's used as a LED driver) pinout ground. Try to make the connection between the led driver and the led strip as short as possible. Similarly, the short should be a common ground wire that is run straight without any loops

4. Do not use Raspberry Pi to directly control neopixel LEDs such as ws2812b or sk6812. Use an external Pico with built-in level shifter (easiest & recommended way) or ESP32 or ESP8266 module for this purpose, preferably communicating and powered directly from Rpi. Remember about the obligatory 3.3V to 5V level shifter. Do not use I2C level shifter because usually they are too slow for the LED data communication. You can find more information in HyperSerialPico, HyperSerialEsp8266, HyperSerialESP32 and HyperSPI projects. Arduino can be used instead of ESP only for very small setups, otherwise Arduino won't provide high refresh rate for a modern high density LED strips.

5. If you ignore point 4, we remind you that direct driving ws2812b / sk6812 from Raspberry Pi is NOT officially supported (due to many potential and hard to diagnose problems and does not work at all on Rpi5 due to breaking hardware changes ⚠️ ) and you are then on your own. Please read carefully the HyperHDR's FAQ section for more information! Especially when it comes to running a service as root and doing it the right way.

6. You can control sk9822 or APA102 SPI LED strips directly from Rpi. But also in this case, a fast 3.3V to 5V level shifter is required!

7. The sk6812 RGBW COLD WHITE can provide you the best quality. Avoid neutral or particularly warm white: they are good for room lighting, but not for precise ambient lighting. Of course, there are faster RGB SPI-driven LED strips like HD107, HD108, sk9822 or APA102, but they provide much worse quality. Note: our parallel multi-segment mode for HyperSerialPico, HyperSerialESP32 and HyperSpi allows to double refresh rate of sk6812 by dividing long LED strip into 2 smaller equal parts and ensure perfect synchronization between them. For ESP32 boards read more: Add I2S prefill & multisegment parallel output HyperSerialESP32#17, Pico boards thanks to precise IO coprocessor dont need pref-fill mode and also support multi-segments.

8. To take full advantage of the unique features of sk6812 RGBW such as dynamic white channel calibration, HyperHDR v18 (or above) and HyperSerialPico, HyperSerialEsp8266, HyperSerialESP32 or HyperSPI must be used.