My intention was to connect it primarily to the Raspberry Pi 4 via USB to create Ambilights/Bias lighting so that the LED strip is positioned behind my TV.
I've had a few problems with the kit, so hopefully someone can help. Initially, I set up the kit according to the prototyping guide and was able to get it to respond to sounds, as well as use an Android app to control lighting colors, and everything seemed to work fine.
Then I temporarily installed a set of LEDs behind the TV and switched the power to PWR_IN on the expansion board. Since then, the LED indicators are always bright and flicker a little. The Android Bluno app seems to still work, but the backlight is almost always close to white and has only a slight color change.
I tried uploading a strandtest sketch and everything looks fine. The LEDs have various rainbow patterns, do not flicker, and everything looks normal.
Moving on, I thought I'd try connecting it to a raspberry Pi and controlling it via Hyperion. I had several attempts to get it to work, but in the end they were able to establish a connection when I set the data rate to 1152000. By quickly uploading the sketch to bluno, I was able to normally see the "Ada" message on the Arduino IDE serial monitor. It looks like it worked to some extent when Hyperion was running on RPI, but on a dark screen, some LEDs were still on and flickering with different colors.
I'm a little confused about how to troubleshoot further, given that strandtest seems to be working fine.
I was also hoping to run a serial USB faster than 1152000 as, but every time I tried to use FastLED sketch running faster, I get corrupted responses in the Arduino IDE, not the "Ada" message.
I can only think that maybe there is some kind of problem with grounding the LEDs?