So this hack is just cobbled together of bits and pieces that the guy in the links didn’t even do himself? Right. All the hard work if done by x86 on the host, lame.

This would be much nicer if it could create the ambient lighting off of, say, composite video. Sample a frame, calculate average color and intensity for a portion of a screen and control the lighting, all from one box.

I wish I had the time to try such a hack.

i dont see why people like ambilight to begin with
this is over complicated imo but having a usb interface to control it allows for more than just video color matching
hey fun3 if you read this, need a winamp plugin to flash in time to music along with a visualaation such as milkdrop, i didnt read throughly but does it allow for hard changes in color and brightness instead of just soft? heh, imagine tv watching with it changing color a few times a second too
but anyway back to my original point
whats so bad about having a matte black background to a tv so the tv claims 100% of your attention?
id rather not have everything around my screen illuminated

@frogz

Problem is most HTPC types are using HDMI (which incurs HDCP) or at the least DVI-D. Its far easier to process the required values and stream them out of a USB port.
It could be done on composite or RGB analogue but like many old standards these are fast going the way of the Tasmanian Tiger.
I know boblight uses GDI getpixel function which is broke in Aero (too slow) maybe some PC guru could grab the video buffer as a quad and scale it to average out colour ?

I came across a similar system a year or so back. It was actually published in an electrical magazine, either silicon chip or elektor i cant remember which (i must dig that out again…) essentially it used an avr microcontroller to analyse the input from either composite, component or VGA (it had all three i belive with minor circuit changes) then it was capable of interpreting the average colour over several regions of the image to output rgb colour. It was at least a year ago that i read the article but this was a pure hardware solution capable of doing multizone rgb output, i was very impressed.

Half way threw I was just watching the Simpsons.

@Frogz
a quick processing script which analyses a audio input and flashes the leds

It’s actually very easing on the eye to have the sides/the background behind the screen illuminated especially if the ambient light is quite low. In fact i often switch the LEDs to a fixed color to light up my room and the desk (about 15watts of led light power) and no other additional light.

“now this is much easier for your “I can’t change the VCRs clock” aunt to set up and enjoy”.

Poeple who can not master a piece of technology delivered to them WITH A USER MANUAL, shouldn’t be allowed to enjoy any tech improvement in their life.
It’s just plain lazyness…

Anyway, this guy, at least, used his brain to make this so I guess he deserves a thumb up.

@Foobarbatz
that’s right, the atmolight system was originally designed Carsten Presser (http://ca.rstenpresser.de/~cpresser/) to be used with the VDR software.
I just used the protocol and the available tools and build the arduino software part to interface with the led modules.

I think it’s a good example how you can use open source hardware and software, combine it and with some lines of code glue it all together to make something nice.

I actually choosed the Atmolight system just because it’s currently supported in the videolan client and wanted to use it for my HTPC. But i really would like to use it with XBMC (http://www.xbmc.org), sadly there is no good solution which can interface with atmolight. The creator of boblightd started a branch couple of months ago, in which he implemented it into XBMC. Sadly the last changes to the code were 3-4 months ago and it’s still not public, but a video on his youtube channel looked promising http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ZfodqE6daw).

When it will be supported in XBMC i think i will switch to boblightd, which can drive much more channels and the arduino code i quickly changed.

@Jack
thanks for the tip …

it looks like he started a new branch just two days ago … i’ll give it a try, thanks …
the subversion checkout is already running and the compiler is warming up … ;)
i hope it compiles, the last release missed his boblightd library which wasn’t public at that time.
I’ll keep my fingers crossed.

@Jack … thanks
is just compiled a snapshot of the boblight branch and it looks promising … but there is a bug in the sourcecode he used to start the branch which prevents you to compile XBMC with vdpau support, so i couldn’t test HDTV videos
it worksm, but my boblight config need some tweaking

There is an English version of manuscript in the Elecktor Magazine Website. When you register(free), you will earn 10 credits which is enough to download that article. I already downloaded the article and also ordered the boards and programmed pics on the magzine website. Now it is time to buy the components, I will try farnell. Another point is to purchase a HDMI splitter 1×2 and a HDMI to VGA. The circuit on article has two options for input, one for scart connector and other for VGA. As no scart connector is used in my country I had to purchase de HDMi to VGA converter. The splitter and converter can be found on ebay by less than US$ 25