[blazo]

This is beyond me.
Changed PSU, added capacitor (2 of them) and I still get flashes.
The only remedy is speed=40 with rate=48000 or less.

I think it might have something to do with the timing, the WS2801 latches in the data when the clock pin has been low for more than 500 microseconds.
If there are lots of other threads on the raspberry pi that also want cpu, it's possible that the boblightd device thread gets preempted while it's in the middle of an spi write.

I've committed a patch which might help with this: http://code.google.com/p/boblight/source/detail?r=468
If you add the threadpriority setting to the device section in boblightd like this:

Code:

threadpriority 99

And then make sure that boblight has rights to enable SCHED_FIFO, check the threadpriority setting on how to accomplish this: http://code.google.com/p/boblight/wiki/b...onf#device

This way the scheduler makes sure that the boblightd device thread will immediately get cpu time when it wants, and it will continue to get cpu time until it is done processing.

Hi Bob,
I was looking in the same direction. Because the flashes weren't completely random after all.
Since I'm not quite comfortable with the code I just wanted to increase the pause to 600us.
I'll try your patch tonight if I get the chance.
BTW RPi is running Raspbian Whezzy and not Occidentalis. I may try it with that one too.

@Memphiz: Sorry to hear that... BTW I'm also playing with another RPi w/ WS2801 pixels with OpenELEC and their version of boblightd. Unfortunately pixels are just off during video playback. I get initial color flash and pixels are illuminated (constant) in menus, but when video starts nothing happens.
I remember reading somewhere that I need a special build of XBMC plugin in order to get LEDs to work. Is it true? Is there something specific on the RPi so that plugin cannot se the video?

Thanks.