Ambilight up-and-running (with HDMI, no PC needed !)

A few years ago, I made an ambi-light, based on a PIC, some ADC controllers, an LM1881, and an bunch of other components. It only worked for a fixed resolution, and used 3 LEDstrips: one for left, one for right, and one for the top. After switching to FullHD and 3D, and HDMI, back in 2012, this ambi-light was no longer usable. After some thinkering and lots of googling, I found a perfect solution. A Raspberry PI with an Easycap video-USB-capture dongle, an HDMI-to-composite converter, some “special” LED-strips, and an HDMI splitter, in conjunction with  source-code you can pull from my github. (click here) So, I bought 5 meter RGB LED-strip, with LPD8806 IC’s. This ledstrip contains 48 LEDs per meter, and each LED is individually adressable. The rest of the components, I still had laying aroud somewhere 🙂 (Except the Easycap, mine was broken, so I ordered a new one) After some fiddling around, I managed to get everything up and running. Starting with a standard Debian Wheezy image, some downloaded sourcecode, some module- and kernel (re-)compilation, and some config-file editing, brought me some fun 🙂 During initial testing, I noticed that the Green and Blue channel on my LED-strip, was “the other way around”, so some last-minute sourcecode modification was needed. I have now an ambi-light, even more advanced then the system that Philips provides 🙂 (I even included a mode for 3D movies ! Side-By-Side and “Top-To-Bottom are both supported)
260 individual LEDS ! Have a look at the movie I made. Notice, around 4 minutes, the “green radar” shots from Discovery channel 🙂 (In real-life, this looks way better … This movie, shot with my GalaxyTab, doesn’t do justice to effect) Next steps:

• Port the whole thing to the Beaglebone Black (aldough, I did not need to overclock my RPI)
• writing a driver for the WS2801 (I already have 10 meters of this LED strip)

Click here to see a movie of our ambi-light in action