TC420 LED Controller

I have been doing a number of projects related to RGB LED control. The LED strips are fairly inexpensive and great for all sorts of lighting needs. Previously I used an Arduino to directly control the lights, but I'm looking for something a little more standalone.

I purchased a TC420 LED Controller

First problem is that the programming software, pled, requires Windows. On my Ubuntu box I installed VirtualBox and got a Windows image from Microsoft. I then installed the pled zip with no problems.

Next step was to get the controller to show over USB. I tried adding my user account to the vboxusers group, but still no USB devices showed up under USB settings. The trick was to add "apt install gnome-system-tools" not sure what in that package allows this to work (need to research that) but it definitely fixed the problem!

That all worked good, and I was able to create a program and even manually run it. But when I downloaded it didn't work. Seems some controllers were flashed poorly and don't work. I ordered another on Amazon and it worked. HOWEVER, when you manually run a program from pled you can set an x256 setting to run the program faster, YOU CAN'T DO THIS FOR A SELF RUNNING PROGRAM. Everything runs at normal speed, and the resolution for that is 40 steps in 1 minute. Very slow and not appropriate for more realtime LED applications. It works fine to simulate sunrise, but not for fast moving led projects.

So this test was a fail, I still haven't found a good self contained controller. Perhaps I could hack the tc420 to get it to run program faster? Or I'll just package up my Arduino controller and continue to use it.