Adalight - Will an ATV be powerful enough?

[kos]

Good afternoon everybody,

First at all sorry for my bad english skills.
I recently ordered all the parts to assemble an "adalight" with 50 LEDs. Now I have to buy a computer or similar, so I had a look at the AppleTV2 that is able to run XBMC - Will this be powerful enough? I read about the fact that a more or less powerful machine is required to do the calculation, but nothing concrete at all.

Somebody got an idea?

brgds,
kos

[sqelch]

I do not think an Appletv is any good, lol. I am unfamiliar with the project you are working on, but the Appletv2 only has ethernet, wifi, hdmi, optical audio out, a usb port(does not have host ability), infrared in, and a white led. There is no BANNED for appletvs on the shelves now, so no XBMC.

[kos]

According to this site it is quite easy to let xbmc run on the atv2 hardware.

http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=HO ... Apple_TV_2

But the question is, will the atv's hardware be powerful enough to calculate the lightning of the adalight?
Or the other way round: What hardware-specs (eg cpu speed) do I need do finish this project? C2D? i3/i5/i7?

[baldengineer]

There is no BANNED for appletvs on the shelves now, so no XBMC.

That isn't true, the ATV2 has been jailbroken for quite some time.

According to this site it is quite easy to let xbmc run on the atv2 hardware.
But the question is, will the atv's hardware be powerful enough to calculate the lightning of the adalight?

The CPU in the ATV2 is might be powerful enough to do the math and drive the LEDs.

However,is there a plug-in for XBMC to support the Adalight project? The tutorial uses Processing, which doesn't exist on iOS. So you might end up having to write quite a bit of software to make the project work.

As already mentioned the ATV2 lacks a USB-Host so you can't drive a USB device (like the Arduino) without some hardware hacking and writing some software drivers.

Looks like a lot of work to get the ATV2 to work. It would be cool if it did, but without a USB-host port I'm not sure it is really feasible.

What hardware-specs (eg cpu speed) do I need do finish this project? C2D? i3/i5/i7?

The Adalight tutorial (http://ladyada.net/make/adalight/) addresses this: "At 800x600 resolution, an older Atom-based nettop could barely muster 13 frames per second. A Core 2 Duo-based MacBook Air did reasonably well at this resolution, just shy of 30 FPS. The beefier CPUs available now should have no trouble running smoothly even at higher resolutions."
Of course, that is using screen captures to analyze the screen content. If you have direct access to the video data through XBMC, it might run on lesser hardware easily.

[kos]

Thanks a lot!

Unfortunately you are right with the XBMC-plugin, they only offer solutions for the analog output up to 4 channels. None for a digital solution like "mine". So I will have to use my macbook for the transitional period and maybe buy a suitable htpc later on... hmm

brgds,
kos

[sqelch]

appletv2 is not available for purchase new at retailers, appletv3 is. appletv3 is without BANNED.