DIY Ambilight

Melan
Participants	Melan
Skills	Soldering, Software, raspberry pi, ESP8266, Linux, Electronics
Status	Active
Niche	Video artsy stuff
Purpose
Tool	No
Location
Cost
Tool category

Melan

DiyAmbilight.jpg {{#if:No | [[Tool Owner::{{{ProjectParticipants}}} | }} {{#if:No | [[Tool Cost::{{{Cost}}} | }}

For a while now I have had a led strip on the back of my TV to illuminate the room, recently however I have upgraded this light strip to addressable leds. And thus am now able to do much nicer effects with it. At first it only consisted of one string of 60 leds at the top of the TV, which for just illuminating the room was enough. But I wanted more, so I added another 60 leds at the bottom of the TV and eventually 15 leds at either sides of the TV making a total of 150 leds. On this wiki page I will document what I have done so far, any extra information and what I might do in the future.

Of course you don't need to use a ESP8266, you could just as well wire the leds to a Raspberry Pi running Hyperion directly, I however, don't only want to use these leds just for Ambilight. When I'm not watching a movie or weeb shit I want to use them as normal lights.

Parts

If you are going to do this, make sure you first measure the length of your TV (and height), you could buy a single 10m strip for example which I reckon is more than enough!

• 2x 1m 60 leds WS2812B [1]
• 2x 15 WS2812B (Although sourced from a single 1m 60 led string)
• Some wiring [2]
• Connectors for the strips¹ (https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32966181600.html?spm=a2g0s.9042311.0.0.27424c4dCdAfnS)
• 1000 uF 16v cap
• ESP8266 [3] (I used a Wemos D1 mini)
• hotglue
• Raspberry pi or something to run Hyperion on.

1) Since I had cut two strips to 15 leds, I soldered the male and female connectors on them so I could easily disconnect/replace them if I wanted to.

Software

ESP8266

Currently I am using WLED[4], it supports Hyperion natively and also has some other functions such as talking to it over MQTT, SACN and UDP.

Software (Raspberry Pi)

I have a Raspberry Pi running Hyperion[5] which receives frames from my workstation, processes them and sends them to the ESP8266.

Workstation (Windows)

TBA

Power

This is a bit tricky, and something I am still working on. I started running things of a 2A 5V wall-wart, but when I was adding the extra 30 leds I took a closer look and noticed that the colour degraded over the course of the whole string, indicating that power was running scares. At the end of the strip I measured around 2~3 volts, which is way too low. I solved this problem by running additional 5v and gnd to a few different points of the whole led string, which solved the problem.

Picture showing the colours degrading over time.

Wled tries to estimate how much amperage you need, but I found this to be incorrect. For example, it told me I needed a 9A power supply to run 150 leds, while in practice all 150 leds at maximum brightness only needed around 4.8A. A Nice feature in Wled however is that you can set a limit on amps it can use, and it will keep the brightness lower so that it doesn't exceed it.

I still need to decide what I want to do for a power supply, the 2A just isn't cutting it anymore. My options are:

• Mean Well LRS-50-5 [6]
• Use a PC power supply
• Rig together 3 5V wall-warts
• Find something decent at work