Kodi, Home Assistant, Hyperion, on two devices

Installation
1

Hello. New here, and new to HA, and most of the other things that I will have forthcoming questions on. I’ve been searching here and there, this forum, hyperion forums, youtube, odroid forums, and any other places I can find for the last week and all I’m doing is getting myself more confused. Here’s what I want to do:

Install some combination of Kodi, Home Assistant, and Hyperion (or suitable alternative ambilight solution) among the two devices that I already own - an odroid C2, and a RPi3. I also own a Raspberry Pi model B, if it can somehow help in all of this, but I’m worried it might be under powered?

I currently have the odroid running LibreELEC, and it does a great job at it, so if possible I’d like to not go back to the RPi3 for Kodi, because I find the odroid to be much peppier. At the moment the RPi3 is running Hass.io. My goal was to run Hyperion on the Pi, and mount everything up discretely behind the TV using Velcro strips or something. (If it matters, I only have one HDMI cable running to the TV, all other components are located in a closet somewhere else.) I tried installing Raspbian (stretch lite) on the Pi, then installing the virtualenv of HA, but the instructions on this site did not work for me, and a lot of googling and trying different things failed also. Seemed that installing Python was the step that I kept getting hung up on. The line of thinking was… I could put Hyperion and HA on the Pi, and mount the Pi, Arduino, and power supplies behind the TV. Now, my plan is: tonight when I get off work, try to install docker on the Hass.io installation and maybe put Hyperion in a docker container? Please forgive me if that’s not the proper nomenclature.

Any suggestions or advice for how to negotiate these three services, among these two devices would be greatly appreciated. How would you do it?

Note: I did see a guide at the odroid forum just a few minutes ago, for installing HA on an odroid, so I’ll try that also, then the Pi can be standalone for Hyperion which should be straight forward.

Thanks!

2

My personal recommendation is to run each thing on dedicated hardware. People are seeing HA already get near the processing limits of the RPi3. You can move the database to a USB stick or a separate SQL install to help, but as HA grows, it may demand more from the hardware. Same with Kodi/LibreELEC. the next version of Kodi and future versions will demand more from the hardware as it advances. Running the two on the same piece of hardware probably can be done, but I would advise against it. Then throw Hyperion on top of all of that and you could run into problems. Hyperion takes a decent amount of hardware processing power to remotely keep in sync with Kodi depending on how many LEDs it’s driving. Also depending on the type of LEDs you have, you may have a hard time driving them with the RPi3. You can drive a string of WS2812b LEDs with an RPi3 at the expense of using the audio channel. Google it, but it has to do with because the RPi3/Linux is not an RTOS so therefore doesn’t have a true interrupt handler like a micro controller that can get the timing right for the LEDs.

My setup is:
Synology NAS --> HA (Docker)
RPi3 --> Kodi/LibreELEC, Boblight
Arduino UNO --> LEDs for Boblight connected via USB to RPi3

3

Thanks for the reply. I do have an Arduino UNO that I will use to drive the LEDs, and I’m also using (will be using) a set of WS2812B LEDs.

What I’ve purchased:

  • WS2812B LED strip
    • Power Supply for LED strip
  • Arduino UNO R3

What I already own:

  • Odroid C2
  • Raspberry Pi 3
  • Raspberry Pi model B

Still need to purchase:

  • USB screen grabber (having trouble finding the recommended one these days as most of the tutorials are some years old now)
  • HDMI splitter

My goal is to not have to purchase another processing device. At this point I’m already nearing the price of a kit like Dream Screen or Lightberry, so definitely trying to avoid more cost than necessary.

I might be in the minority here, but I don’t intend to use HA for much. In fact, the majority of it’s use will be to control the ambient lighting behind the TV. I’d like the ability to switch it off entirely (as I don’t plan to use it all the time), and I’d also like the ability to switch between plain old ambient lighting, and active ambilight/boblight/hyperion type lighting. I believe HA can do this for me, as I’ve seen BRUH automation youtube videos showing it. Other than that, I have one light bulb/switch that I’d like to turn on at night, but this can also be accomplished with a dusk-til-dawn sensor - I was just trying to avoid the electrical work.

I have a Harmony Elite, and the ultimate goal is to gain control of Hyperion with HA, then map certain Harmony keys to these actions in HA, mostly for turning on/off. Not sure if that’s possible yet though.