Ambilight TV with Raspberry Pi and XBMC

This isn’t the first ambient lighting system DIY we have brought to you but this is one of the very cool ones because it is so good at what it is supposed to do. This Ambilight TV, with Raspberry Pi brain, projects on the wall behind a TV the colors that are shown on the TV screen. And not only does it clone RGB well (as is shown in the video below), it can clone a complicated milieu of colors like in an animation picture. The creator of this lighting system made a clip of it plying with a Lion King song on the TV, and the result is wonderful.

If it’s all about light, it’s all about LEDs. Here, SMD LED strips with WS2801 chips are used with a Raspberry Pi controller. The reason being SMD strips come with an adhesive tape on the back strip, so their mounting is easy and reliable.

While how-to-mount part is easy with SMD strips, it is still important to know the where-to-mount part. The suggestion is to affix LEDs from the bottom right (if you are looking from behind the TV) with the strip’s arrow indicating towards the right. Connect then from the GPIO from the Raspberry Pi directly to this input on SMD. Move in anticlock direction, wiring the output of the first strip with the input of the second strip and so forth until, once again, you are at the bottom left. Since you would want to avoid formation of a loop, the output of the last strip must be left unconnected.