Ambilight with Raspberry Pi and Hyperion
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Last weekend I spent most of it working on an Ambilight project.
I originally wanted the LEDs i bought to go inside my PC and have some type of remote controlled colour changing LED setup. It worked and was controlled by my Arduino but I found that the LEDs were slightly too big and I didn’t really have any where to mount them.We have a lot of cardboard at work an i thought cardboard would be the best and easy way to get a working rig up even though it will look ugly as hell. Once it is behind my TV it shouldnt matter though as you wont be able to see it.
I have a 32" TV and I cut the carboard up to be slightly smaller than that as i didnt want to see anything sticking out over the edge of the TV. Other blog posts and videos show that others peoples setups are similar to mine.
I went ahead and cut the cardboard, I didn’t really measure it accurately or use a ruler to draw the lines. But its square enough.
Next task was to figure out how many LEDs I wanted around each edge. I decided to go 15 along the top and bottom, and 10 along the sides.
I made a silly mistake when punching the holes out. I did 15 holes along the side and 10 along the top and bottom. Again it was fast and inaccurate as you can probably tell.
Next it was time for the LEDs to go in. I didn’t realise how much the cable would stick out from each LED. Because of this it doesnt really mount well to my TV.
Once the LEDs were in place I needed to test that they all worked and were in the correct order. I plugged my Arduino in and used the testing patterns I coded for when they were in my PC case.
The Arduino has female inputs for its various pins but the Raspberry Pi has male pins and I didn’t have any female jump cables. I had to bodge some wires and connecters to make them fit on the pins on the Raspberry Pi and the male jumpe cables.
It’t not very nice but it works.
I plan on taking a few more picuters of my final setup once I have bought some more items. I’ll try and get a video up of it all working but unfortunaly my HTC One suffers from some purple tinge when filming in low light.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mchlZqa4eR0
Test video before i plugged it all in
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That’s really cool! I want to see them actually working as ambilight.
This is the same LED set that you’ve been talking about, right?
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I snapped a couple pics last night while watching Xmen.
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Is the colour static, as in do you have to set it yourself or does it change based on whatever colours are on the screen?
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It changes with what’s on screen. First one is all red because the screen is red and the second image you can see the corner is blue/purple.
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@Scuzz said:
what’s on screen. First one is all red because the screen is red and the second image you can see the
I thought that might be the case, that’s really cool.
So how does it know what colour to display? What/how is it reading whatever data it requires in order to determine which colour to display?
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I’m not sure on the exact details but I think it checks the colours around the edge of the screen and gets a average value and then maps that colour to the LED.
There is a java configuration program where you say where all the LEDS are, how many you have and which way around the tv they go.
You can also change the area where the colours are captured from and the default colours.https://github.com/tvdzwan/hyperion
@Schamper told me about it and it think it works a lot better than boblight even though I could only get it working on openelec because of some GNUTLS error on the other XBMC clones.
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I also have a Hyperion setup in combination with OpenELEC. My frame is a bit more… solid though ;)
I constructed an aluminium frame a long time ago. The benefit of having such a frame is that I can fit it on any 40" TV and all the LEDs will still be correctly lined up. So as long as my next TV is a 40" one, I’m good ;) . I initially used it in combination with boblight and an Arduino. Always had lots of trouble with it though, it would flicker a lot, would take a lot of time to get ready for use (first open COM port, then special boblight app, then XBMC), etc. It was just a lot of trouble and I ended up not using it a lot.
Now I always had the plan of using my RPi for media, but it was never possible because I first needed to get a new receiver that had HDMI ports. When I finally got one, I started changing everything. Installed OpenELEC, connect the wires to the RPi, change the wiring a bit and put the Pi behind my TV.
(It’s somewhere down there, where you can see a bunch of tiny wires)My Pi is on 24/7 since it doesn’t use that much power, and I don’t have to mess around with using the LEDs now. I just start any video and the LEDs will just work. Haven’t had any issues with it so far, and I’ve been running it like this for maybe 2 months now. I still need to do some proper calibrating but eh :P .
Because the Pi is on 24/7 it also allows me to use the Hyperion Android app to control the LEDs. I still have some project idea in mind where I can connect the LEDs to a service like IFTT, but that’s something for later. -
How much difference does it make having the LEDs pointing away from the wall and not towards the wall?
I have seen a few set up like yours and few set up like mine.I would love to have my Raspberry Pi connected to my network.
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@Scuzz From what I’ve read, you get the best effect by having them point at the wall at like a 45 degree angle. I’ve seen a lot of PVC pipe structures where you can easily adjust the angle.
