Mp3 board smoked

[Warlock]

This would be amazing seeing as a few of us Helux users are looking for a way to keep the investment in gear going. All thanks to sparkfun discontinuing the mp3 board that the helix is built around. It might help save the Helix and take that nail out of the coffin so to speak.

blinky flashy. I love this stuff

 

[blantrip]

Warlock did you ever get a replacement mp3 board? I'm sorry I didn't see your post earlier, I would have sent you one off of my board. I'll probably be selling all of my Helix components if you are interested in any. As I mentioned above, if you plan on going the pixel route, especially if you'll need more than one controller I'd suggest heading the FPP way.

I've been using Greg's Helix gear for five years or so and the main reason I selected this was the Helix Main Board being a standalone processor with MP3 player and the ability to connect multiple Helix Main Boards wirelessly. The downside is the proprietary boards. Helix worked great for me until I started to add pixels. Greg developed a board to interface between the Helix Main Board and the pixel controller of your choice (E682's in my case). The issue I had and couldn't resolve was connecting more than one pixel controller to the Helix pixel board. So last year I finally decided to control the house pixels with the Helix (synchronized with music) and I ran my pixel mega tree from FPP with just random designs (not synchronized with music).

So this year (2015 Christmas season) I put my Helix on the shelf and started my conversion to FPP. The only things I could retain were my stand alone SSRs and my E682s. To re-use the SSRs I got some new Renard boards and some dongles and I was on my way.

If I was able to re-use the Helix Daughter boards and the Helix SSR Daughter boards, I wouldn't have needed the Renards and I wouldn't have had to build some extra standalone SSRs.

It's been 5 great years with my Helix but FPP but the RaspberryPI has a larger community and it still gives me the standalone controller and wireless connection I originally selected the Helix for.

Any questions you have I'd be happy to help.

My Helix gear:
1 - Helix Main Board V2
1 - Helix Main Board V3
2 - Helix Daughter Boards (built)
3 or 4? - Helix Daughter Boards (bare)
1 - Helix SSR Daughter Board (built)
2? - Helix SSR Daughter Boards (bare)
1 - Helix Pixel Controller Board (built)
1- Helix Pixel Controller Board 9bare)

 

[Warlock]

Wow amazing offer. Thank-you. I have 2 of them now that will keep me going for at least 2 years. Hard to believe it was my mp3 player messing up all along. The last 4 years has been a load of never ending issues. Once I got it all running it was great. I have 4 main boards myself. Depending on price I might be interested in the 32 channel daughter board but that would be about all. I was enquiring about the raspberry pi 2b and the fpp is I really want to learn this gear and make the jump to full pixels ( insane ideas no one is doing atm (( at the moment )) with them. Plus I want to start using puxels for my halloween haunted house designs as well. So learning is going to be a huge step all over again ( just got ised to Vixen 2.5 and jow going to learn nutcracker/xlights and vixen 3) so I got 2 years to perfect my ideas but have the itch to get started. Lol

blinky flashy. I love this stuff

 

[gmbartlett]

I agree, it sounds like connecting to daughterboards would be too complex and resource intensive.6

I am slowly converting parts of FPP to C++, and one of the things in the back of my mind has been to make the FPP MultiSync code based on a base class and a "FPP MultiSync" class similar to how I am doing in other parts of the code such as the channel output and media output areas.

If there is interest, and you have anything describing the sync protocol, I could keep helix in mind when I get to converting this part of FPP and could try to make FPP control helix nodes.

I started a new thread called Helix and the FPP so it will be easier to follow this idea. I posted the Helix Configuration Control document in that thread.