The July Raspbmc update brought 2 changes to boblight:
- It now uses Speedy’s boblight daemon
Speedy’s version requires some changes to boblight.conf so you may find your existing version no longer works.Basically, all ‘name’ values need to be changed to exact 3 characters long. That includes the values in the [color] and [light] sections.See this version here to get an idea of what needs to be changed: http://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/6885567/boblight_50xWS2801_speedy.conf
The advantage of this is, as the name suggests, better performance and less CPU intensive. - Colour info is now captured by a standalone process, boblight-dispmanx
Previously, colour information was captured by a modified OMXplayer when video was playing. Now, boblight-dispmanx is running all the time and essentially taking screenshots of whatever is on screen. e.g the XBMC interface.
While the OMXplayer version read settings from boboptions.txt, the new dispmanx version requires the settings to be passed to it when it starts.
So, to get boblight working in the July update, it’s easier than ever:
- Install Raspbmc July release
I always tend to do a complete reinstall which seems to go a lot smoother than doing an update, but an update should work too. - Create/copy boblight.conf
This needs to be placed in /etc/
Make sure it is ‘Speedy’ compatible (see above). - (optional) Apply your boblight options
Edit this file:sudo nano /etc/init/boblight-dispmanx.conf
Look for the line beginning “exec /usr/bin/boblight-dispmanx…” and change to whatever settings you had in boboptions.txt. If you use boblight clients on other machines to send colour info to the Pi, you may also want to change priority from 100 back to 129. Update: add “-b on” to enable lights for GUI
- Enable boblight in Raspbmc Settings
Your LEDs should start working, if not, try rebooting.
Any problems, leave a comment below.
Digging up old discussion, but I’ve been in testing my own setup for a few weeks now and have finally gotten a Pi to drive the first of my WS2801 strings (current RBMC didn’t auto-start boblightd for me). Any way, my LED colours are all wrong – blue when what’s on screen is red, etc, and I’m pretty sure it’s because I need to specify the colour order differently: while I was driving the full string with a ‘duino and FastLED, I had to specify the colour order as BGR to get the RGBCalibration sketch to run “correctly”. Is there a way to tell boblight the colour order?
Is there a CLI command to make boblight-constant turn light one LED only? It would help with tweaking the config if I could do this.
It’s been a while since I used boblight. I think you can do that by only listing one LED in the config file.
It’s been a while since I’ve used boblight, I don’t think there’s a command for it but I think you can do it by only entering 1 LED in the config file if that helps