For a while I have had an DIY Ambilight behind the TV the LEDs where of the so called pixel LEDs consisting of 50 individual controlleble RGB LEDs.
Pixel LED string
The LEDs where mounted on a board about the same size of the screen paralel to the screen the result was ok but because of the 50 LEDs and the way they where mounted I wanted to step it up a bit. To drive the LEDs I use Hyperion runing on a Raspberry Pi with OSMC.
new TV new chance to do it right
Recently a friend got a new TV and I got his old one which was not only a couple of years younger and slightly bigger then my previous TV it also is a 3D TV and smart (but not connected because the lack of updates). Being bigger meant that the board that hold my LEDs didn’t fit the TV anymore so back to back to AliExpress looking for beter LEDs I opted for a 60LEDs per meter lightstrip whith adhesive backing. This meant that I could just stick the strip to the backside of the TV which resulted in a slight angle on the top and sides and straight down on the bottom side. More LEDs per meter made sure that the distance between the LEDs was reduced. Before I had 50 LEDs in total now I have 202 in total so more than 4 times the amount.
Driving the LEDs
To drive the old LEDs I used Hyperion classic the controller software was running on My Raspberry Pi which also runs OSMC. the LED’s conect to an Arduino Pro mini with an USB to Serial module. With the new LEDs I used a Sparkfun Pro Micro this board has an USB transiever so I could remove the USB to serial. The firmware on both boards is Adalight.ino. Hyperion captures the image and process thries to match the LED color to the colors on screen. When not playing a video I used Home Assistant to set a static color using this integration until the original Hyperion whas discontinued.
Upgrade the software
Although the original software was still working for it’s main purpose the lack of control by Home Assistant irritated me so started upgrading the software to the new Hyperion-ng the new software has an web interface to configure and control Hyperion which was a great step from the old java based control app that you need to use to configure the old Hyperion. It is possible to connect a sreencapture card and use the input as a source at this moment I’m not using this. Instead of the old static color I now use an effect called Candle when not playing video through Kodi.
The web interface