New to FPP, software questions, driving my own display protocol

[thtempelmann]

So, I'm familiar with software dev, and usually write stuff myself instead of collecting 100s of libs I don't fully understand

I've built a large LED board out of 24 Hub75 panels, giving me a 384x256 px resolution. I am now looking for ways to provide pretty content for it. Someone mentioned FPP and xLights to me, so I came here to have a look what FPP is about.

However, after browsing for half an hour thru forum, manual and FAQ, I still have no idea what this software does, so before I spend more time being clueless, I was wondering if someone can give me a few pointers about what I'm trying to achieve:

My LED board is "dumb" and needs to be fed the image as a sequence of RGB565 values, which get send to its 4 PicoW controllers via large UDP packets (with a little extra header in each packet). So, it's a custom protocol for optimal performance over WiFi. I can get about 16 fps with this. I currently send the images from a Raspi 5, with a custom program (both a native ARM and a Python program exist for it). The Pi5 currently captures frames from a camera and then passes them to the board.

I would like to have other options, e.g. generating pretty color effects. I am not experienced doing graphics and therefore would waste days trying to re-invent the wheel here.

Questions:

1. I got the impression that FPP or xLights or both can generate such animated images. Is that so and if so, which one does the image generation and what does the other do?
2. Can I get it to output frames in my board size and can I then supply my own program code that transmits each frame to my board over Wifi?
2b. Or does FPP have a protocol by which it can deliver the rgb565 frames to my PicoWs, and which I can easily implement? (However, each PicoW only handles a quarter of the image, so the protocol would need to be able to deliver only parts of the images to different receivers.)
3. The manual states that it supports MQTT - but it appears it's not running its own broker, which I need for my own purposes. Can I install and run a MQTT broker with FPP?
4. Why does FPP only come as an installer image? Can I really not keep my own Debian installation with my extra programs and just run FPP on it when needed? Where are the instructions for installing the software on an existing Debian system?

[darylc]

Theres a lot to unpack there.  If I was trying to achieve what you are, I;d get a colorlight sender card and colorlight receivers.  Then your Pi just has to output to hdmi whatever you want to appear on the panels. The hdmi plugs into the colorlight sender card.

As to your specific questions:
1. Xlights generates the data, FPP is a playback engine largely
2. You would need to create an FPP plugin or modify the code to do this
2b No
3. Mosquitto is installed but not enabled, you can enable it via the cli
4. FPP is an appliance.  If you try to install it on Debian it will take over your system which unlikely to be what you want.