Re: RaspiLight (ambient light)

[Vivien]

Hi everyone,

I'm new here, but I follow this project since a lot of time.

Since this morning I thinking about a new project, it is possible to make a kind of ambilight system with a RaspberryPi ?

There is already the adalight which allow you to make a ambilight system for your pc screen but not with hdmi.

First of all we have to know how to parse hdmi data to use top, left and right pixel of the screen to know the colour of the LED(urgh ! it will be difficult I think);

Secondly we have to know how to connect light, can the GPIO connection can do this ? Else we can plug a USB-2-serial cable made with a FTDI chip, maybe it's good.

Thirdly made a daemon (program, add-on, or what ever you want) to enhance your screen

Hope you understand my project (and my English).

If you want I can introduce myself next time.

I can't wait to have my Raspberry to work with !!!

Cheers,

Vivien

[jannis]

Depending of the speed we can toggle the GPIO-pins we can use them directly to dim/control LEDs (using FETs or s.th.)

For reference: Software/Hardware projects to support in "ambilight clone on/with the rpi":

http://atmolight.de/index.php/news.html (Just realised it's german only :/)

https://code.google.com/p/boblight/

[mangoose]

As mentioned in another post, merging Boblight & WiringPi should allow to control LED via GPIO without any external board.

-P-

[BernhardX]

Hey,

i'd like to do something like this too. How is your project going? Please PM!

Greets

[Vivien]

Hi all,
The project is still in development.
Tomorrow I will make the first test, I will give you some feedback.

[mvdpoel]

Really cool! I'm looking forward to your first test results!

If you need testers.... i'm available!

[Vivien]

So,
First test are a bit concluding, but I have a problem with my led strip, it's hardly light all led.
First I've got like 10 of 25 LED lighting, and after 23 LED, don't know why.
Other problem, without GPU driver all the flux goes to CPU so when I move my terminal GPIO stop sending data (it look like this, not 100% sure, I have no DSO @ home).
Hope before next week end I will post photo or code

Vivien

[plfort]

I've managed to get an ambilight clone with boblight library and XBMC.
You can see a proof of concept here : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FRV4z_VOVs
This video show only static background light with boblight XBMC add-on, video playback doesn't work...
It works fine with my rpi running boblight daemon and a PC playing video and sending light informations to the rpi (video soon).
I use the same hardware as adalight (WS2801: 25 LEDs) and SPI for sending data to the strip.

[Vivien]

Hi,
I use the same hardware (WS2801) and SPI.
Have you got the same problem ? LED hardly light.

[plfort]

At first, I used the bcm2835 GPIO library (http://www.open.com.au/mikem/bcm2835/) but LEDs flickered (probably because of bad delay between data words).
Now I use this kernel (with spi driver) and everything works fine.
You can try with this file : http://download.analog.com/27516/forumm ... spi_test.c

[Vivien]

With wiringPi, LED are flickering (in fact only the ones at the start of the chain).
So now I work the kernel driver.
I'll post any change A.S.A.P.

[survender]

Wow, this may get a very good project!
As it is writtin in the beginning, would it really be possible to use HDMI as input for color-information?
What about the HDMI HDCP encryption? And what about playing BlueRays? Can you get any color-information out of HDMI when it is HDCP encrypted? I read that the Master-Key was leaked, so maybe it would be possible for RaspiLight?

[Vivien]

If masterkey is really leaked it could ease the project.
The project is delayed because my SD card died last week, and amazon shipping is quite long ...
I'm porting my project for computer and FTDI chip, hope I will post something before end of the week, expect if my computer die before ...

[Vivien]

The Raspilight is alive !
This is not usable, the refresh rate is poor and the CPU load is 100%
So I think I need to make it more low-level.
I will post something next week (holiday is ending I will work more )

[dominicclifton]

Hi guys,

I'm going to make a setup for XBMC (Windows) and RaspberryPi where XBMC on windows talks over the network to my raspberry pi which drives the lights.

I'm going to be using 2x AdaFruit 12mm Diffused Thin Digital RGB LED Pixels (50 RGB leds total)

http://www.adafruit.com/products/322

Also going to use an I2C to SPI bridge to allows up to 4 sets of lights to be controlled using a single I2C output from the Pi. Not sure about latency issues yet, will have to suck it and see.

http://www.nxp.com/products/interface_a ... es-packing

While i'm waiting for parts to arrive I'm going to working on the XBMC side of things. I've downloaded the XMBC source code and I'm thinking of implementing the XBMC side of things as a peripheral. See CPeripheral and CPeripheralBus.

First I basically need to figure out how to hook into the XBMC video output code and make it talk to a peripheral.

Just thought I'd share this with you. If anyone else is doing anything similar please get in touch.

[plfort]

@dominicclifton : look at boblight and boblight xbmc extension, there is a video in my previous post.

[snrlcd]

Looking forward to this project, it will be my first..
Also was looking into adalight with Arduino,
but went for Raspberry Pi, will see how it goes..

[smokie75]

So it would be safe to assume that a single raspi is incapable of driving the LEDs as well as running Raspbmc?

[plfort]

@smokie75 : Yes, but you can't access to the framebuffer to take screenshot during playback because the video is directly decoded by the GPU ... so it will not work
If anyone have an idea how to take screenshot with omxplayer or access the framebuffer, it will help !

[Vivien]

As plfort say if someone have advanced knowledges about framebuffer it would be appreciate
And as I have already said I occupied by familly and friends visit, but summer is ending in south of France, and next I will be full time on it (hum After work )
I have promised you a photo, I'm overbooked so I'll try to do my best to send one next week

[dominicclifton]

My project, AmbiPi, is going well. Current source code (for XBMC) is here:

https://github.com/hydra/xbmc/commits/master

And I'm using a custom Python client, which can be found here, long term i plan to use C, but the python code will do for now.

https://github.com/hydra/PixelPi/tree/ambipi

The nice thing about they way I'm doing the video is that I hook directly into the XBMC rendering
system and thus no screen capturing is required. Also, because of this the code processes the unscaled source image which means handling black bars at the top/bottom is less of an issue.

I also expose a new item in the peripheral menu (AmbiPi) in XBMC for the Python AmbiPi code running on the Raspberry Pi. The menu allows you to enable/disable the AmbiPi and configure connection details (for now).

The order and amount of LEDs in the output stream will be changed/configurable at a later date too. For now it's designed to work with a single strip of 50 lights. I have two strips here.

[dominicclifton]

A video of my work (AmbiPi) is here:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_h1wK67oEw

[plfort]

Hi Dominic,
Is XBMC running on the Raspberry Pi? Or on another computer ?
Edit : Sorry, this is indicated in your previous post ...

[dominicclifton]

Hi Dominic,
Is XBMC running on the Raspberry Pi? Or on another computer ?
Edit : Sorry, this is indicated in your previous post ...

Currently my mods to xbmc are wndows specific but I'm working on making it cross platform. Were you wanting to run it on the pi?

[plfort]

Yes but it seems impossible because of the rendering method during video playback on the Pi...