Ambilight Clone

Hello guys,

First of im Luke and im new to the forum so if this is in the wrong area feel free to move it.

Ive been a long time lurker and have been thinking of an ambilight clone for my 27" IPS for a while now.

I have also wanted to get into electronics for a long time now and thought that this would be the perfect opportunity. Have some basic electronic knowledge as I have been building and modding computers for several years now.

But first I have a few questions,

I will be using an arduino to control it. (as far as ive read its the best for this type of thing, if so what model?)

For the actual lighting what leds should I use, Have been looking at ShiftBrite’s not sure if thats the best option though?

I assume I need another board to attach all the LEDS or shiftbrite’s to?

What sort of way should i be looking at powering this?

I am the type of person that will happily spend the time and money to make something look and work correctly.

This will be used with my pc, for movies, gaming and just general work. (I am a Graphic & Web Design Student)

Thank you in advance guys, Luke.

EDIT: if you google “Ambilight clone”, you’ll see that others have done this before. For example, Amblone is a clever open-source project that uses the PC’s CPU to estimate the average color of the display. If you’re just using this with your PC (and not for a PVR / DVD player / XBox etc), it looks to be a good option.

ORIGINAL MESSAGE:

I looked at this years ago but never got very far (since I saw that Philips had already done it).

Your biggest challenge will be decoding the video signal in order to determine what colors to generate with the LEDs. An Arduino definitely is NOT up to this task. If you’re using HDMI / DVI, there are probably a video processing chips that you can adapt to the purpose, or you could do this with an FPGA instead. If you’re using analog video (RGBHV), you could probably utilise a clever analog circuit.

Another option is to use a color light sensor, and position this to “look” at the screen to determine the average color. This option you could actually do with an Arduino.

As for LEDs, I’d suggest looking on EBay for “RGB LED strip”. These come on rolls and can be cut to length, are flexible, waterproof and come with adhesive backing. Very bright and cheap. You could stick these strips around the back of your monitor, or desk area as desired. You could then either use special LED driver chips or just PWM from the controller circuit driving MOSFETs to control each channel. These strips are typically designed to run on 12V, and have strings of 3 LEDs in series (with integral resistors).

Providing power will depend on what LEDs you use (and how many), and the required voltage. Most people have power supplies / wall warts lying around the house that would work.