Make Your Room Come Alive with This DIY Ambilight System - Wow!

hey everyone in today's video I'm going to be showing you all how to build your own ambient Light TV now this is something that I've been wanting to do as a personal project for a long time and now that I'm finally getting around to it I figured hey I should probably film this as well so you guys can all achieve this awesome ambient lighting effect on your TV or monitor using a Raspberry Pi and the program Hyperion but we'll get more on that later so without further Ado let's just get started foreign [Music] so to kick things off before I get to the part list I figured I'd give you all the nitty-gritty on like how much this is going to cost so really it depends on the hardware that you're going to be using and some of you may already have some of the parts on hand already which would decrease your cost but for me this was around 200 and that's because I had nothing on hand but I also did go overboard in a few places which you'll see later in the video and secondly what we're doing here today specifically is setting up an external device like a game console to work with the Hyperion application this method will not work with apps that are pre-built into your TV like if you have a Roku TV for example so with all that being said let's go ahead and jump into the part list so the first thing we're going to need is a Raspberry Pi specifically I'm using the raspberry pi 3 Model A plus you can get these as part of a kit on eBay for about fifty dollars just make sure you have an SD card to go along with it preferably nothing smaller than four gigabytes and optionally you can get a case for the Raspberry Pi which will make mounting the device later a little easier I did buy one but it's currently still on its way so you'll probably see it later in the video and HDMI capture card I bought this for ten dollars on eBay and it actually works pretty well I'll leave a link down below for all the parts mentioned today next up a ws-2812b LED strip so with this the price fluctuates based on the size of your TV or a monitor I'm using a 65 inch TV today so I bought a 16 foot 300 LED count strip and this was about 30 dollars a power supply I'm going with a 5 volt 15 amp power supply and I bought this one from Amazon for about twenty dollars now honestly you probably don't need to go as high as 15 amps for this you can most likely get away with an 8 amp power supply but I figured I would go on the higher side with this one an HDMI splitter now this part may vary for you depending on how many outputs you want so for me I'm connecting this to my Xbox series s because it's my most used console in the living room which is used for gaming and apps like Netflix and Hulu so because that's all I want and need I went with the Rocketfish to Output HDMI splitter with 4K Ultra HD and HDR compatibility I actually bought this one from Best Buy for seventy dollars but the thing worth noting is you'll need at least two outputs when doing this one for your console or any other device that you're using and one for the Raspberry Pi a DC Barrel jack adapter these are cheap to find I bought a pack of these for about eight dollars and this is where I said I went a little overboard you don't have to grab a pack of these you know you can just buy they might sell a four pack or something like that which would be a lot cheaper next up two male to female Dupont connectors I bought a pack of these as well for eight dollars next a micro USB cable that we can use as a sacrifice we just want to make sure when we strip the ends that we can use the power and ground wires from the cable and lastly some velcro strips that I bought from Walmart for two dollars that we can use to mount the pie to the TV additionally things to make your life a little bit easier would be some scissors and a wire stripper now I know the part list seems like it's kind of a lot but I promise you this is actually pretty easy to get all set up so the first thing that we're going to start with is with the LED strip we just want to measure it and see if we can get the exact length that we're going to be using on the TV and once we achieve the length that we want to get we're going to go ahead and snip the ends and now we are done with the LED strip for now so let's just go ahead and head over and start configuring the Raspberry Pi and now we need to head over to the PC and download the application hyperban which is hyperion already pre-installed into the Raspberry Pi OS light and all we have to do is just hit the download button here and download the zip and again I'll leave a link for everything that I'm using in the description below now that that's downloaded we're just going to right click it go to show in folder and we're going to take this over to the desktop on the hyperband zip we're going to right click it and go to extract to hyperban and now the next program you're going to need is the Raspberry Pi imager I'll leave a link for this as well but you can get this from the Raspberry Pi official website once you have that downloaded we're going to start off by choosing our operation system we're going to go down and select use custom and it's going to take us to our downloads folder so let me just go ahead and go back one and you're gonna see the hyperban folder that was already extracted earlier inside we have the image file we're going to click that and now we're going to select our storage I have my SD card mounted as G you can see it's 32 gigabytes I'm going to select that and lastly we're gonna hit this Cog wheel here and this is gonna set up some additional things for us like set a hostname enable SSH you can set a username and a password for me my username will be pi and my password will be pi we're also going to configure my wireless LAN which already has my password and information in there select your wireless LAN country which we need to roll to the US almost there almost there there it is and then we're going to select our local settings which this is my time zone here and I'm gonna hit everything looks good here I'm going to hit the save button and now we can just hit right it's going to tell you all the data currently on the SD card is going to be erased so just make sure you're using an empty card formatted to FAT32 so just press yes to continue and this is probably going to take about five to ten minutes so I'll see when this is done okay and once it's all done it's just going to tell you to eject your SD card and if you do that we're going to put that into the Raspberry Pi and power it up with that being said we need a way to connect to the Raspberry Pi so I have the application putty here again I'll leave everything in the description below and in order to access the pie we're gonna need either our host name or the IP address of the pie now earlier we actually did set a hostname and that was Raspberry Pi dot local enter and it's going to say logging as we created the username pi and the password pi and you can see we're logged into hyperban now the first thing we have to do once we're in here is enable the gpio pins because natively they will not work unless you're running as a root user which hyperband is not to my knowledge anyways so in order to do that we need to do Studio system CTL disable dash dash now and Hyperion at Pi this will disable that user and now we need to enable the root user so to do that that's sudo system CTL enable dash dash now and it's going to be Hyperion at root hit enter and now that this is done we should be able to use our gpio pins the last bit of advice that I can give is if you're having a problem connecting to the internet you could type in sudo raspy Dash config and this will take you to a whole setup information here where you can set up the localization options like your WLAN County if you set this up correctly nine times out of ten that should fix your issue so now let's go ahead and head over to setting everything up now so now we can actually install our LED strip to the TV by removing the adhesive sticker that's on the back and then just running it up TV now there are multiple ways to uh say cut the corners on your TV uh you can cut the strips into fours and then connect them with wires via soldering or you can just do it the lazy way and fold the corners personally this doesn't bother me and I'm probably not going to notice the difference but you can do it the proper way if you'd like it's also worth noting that they sell clips that you can just attach these to to make your life a little easier but like I said I'm going to be going with this method for the remainder of the TV once we got to the end of the TV I purposefully left a little extra just in case I was a little off when I was measuring earlier so now all I have to do is just snip off the excess by cutting it on the copper line and once that's done we just stick it down and I stopped it a little short because I figured if I made it go under the wire the wires would be obstructing the light so I just made it a little shy from the corner and this is how it looks with the LED strips all applied to the TV so now what we want to do is find out where we want to mount our Raspberry Pi ideally it should be connected closest to your HDMI ports on your TV or you know wherever your power outlets are going to be located whatever would be easiest for you but I found this side of the TV actually works pretty well for me it's a big open space so I'm probably going to mount it here now you can see I just went ahead and slapped a velcro strip right on here and I also put a velcro strip on the back of the Raspberry Pi which now has the case that I mentioned earlier this came in anyways uh with the strip on here I'm just gonna press it on here to see how firm it is make sure it's not going to drop and make sure it'll hold all the connections that we're going to put into it and now we can get to using our sacrificial USB cable that we also mentioned earlier you're going to notice on this one I already have the ends stripped and we have a white and a red wire revealed this may be different for your cable uh what's important that's worth noting is that red is the power and white or black is usually the ground and those are the only two ones we're going to need on there you may see green green I believe is the data wire you're not going to want or need that the next thing we're going to do is connect this up using a barrel Jack connector to the LED strip and you're going to notice on the ends here I already have the wires stripped and it's also worth noting that I'm using the female end of the strip with the male end being cut off and also if you take a look at the wires you're gonna see that there are arrows pointing away that is the data flow pointing away from the power source which is what we want you don't want those arrows pointing back at you so now connecting it to the barrel Jack connector is actually pretty easy on the end of the LED strip you should notice that you have a white and red wire that's just hanging off that is also your power and ground wire what we're going to do is take the power wire from the micro USB cable the red wire and connect it to the red wire of the LED strip all we have to do to do that is just spray out the ends twist them together and then we can shove them into the barrel Jack connector and once it's in the connector all you have to do is just tighten it up with a screwdriver you can tell which end is positive or negative on the bail Jack connector by just looking at the front there should be a plus or minus symbol on there and then we're going to do the same thing for the grounding wire which was the white cable on my micro USB cord and the white cable on the LED strip again this may be white and black for you if you're using a different micro USB cable but it's the same thing just spray out the ends twist them together a little bit and then shove them into the negative side of the barrel Jack connector and tighten it up okay now we can start talking about Connections so I have the HDMI splitter right in front of me and I'm going to show you how this is connected I have the pi mounted to the TV and I have the HDMI capture card that I purchased earlier plugged into the USB port on the Raspberry Pi which goes into one of the outputs on the HDMI splitter additionally another output that I have goes directly into the TV after that the middle wire which is the input is connected to my Xbox series s which is right underneath it in the cabinet now we're going to take our micro USB cord and plug that in as well should be obvious at this point that we chopped off the actual USB end of the cord now we're going to set up some Dupont connectors you're going to take the DuPont connector and plug it into the sixth pin from the top on the right which is the gpio 18 pin and now for the mail end we're going to go down to the LED strip and you're going to see we have the female end of the wire here we're going to plug this directly into the middle at least for this Strip This is the data connection that will transfer basically what Hyperion sees to the LED strip this is also what we enabled earlier when we had to log in as the root user additionally I also added a grounding cable to the gpio six pin which is the third from the top from the right and what I did with this was connect this to the end wire not the red wire on the LED strip just to leave a grounding connection because I noticed later in the video when I practiced with the lights that I was getting a flickering effect so grounding the pins seemed to fix my issue and now we can finally plug this in and test this I have my power brick on the floor and I'm just gonna plug it in now this does usually take a bit to register it's worth noting that the Raspberry Pi does have a red and green light on it so it does have power it takes a second for the lights to register so they should turn on here any second what usually happens is that all the power has to go into the capture card you know the pi has to turn on and then it's got to actually capture the connection from the device which again in my case is my Xbox though there it is and you can see we have the strip running we do have some additional things that we need to change within the Hyperion settings because it's most likely not going to work off rip and we're also going to have to make note of the actual LED count of the strip that's on the back of the TV so this means going through and going on the top or the sides of the TV and counting all the individual strips in a row we want to know how many LEDs are on the right side how many LEDs are on the left side and the top and the bottom okay so now in order to actually change the settings within Hyperion all we have to do is open the browser of our choice and type in either the IP address of our Raspberry Pi or the host name so if you remember for me earlier that was Raspberry Pi dot local colon and we're going to do 80 90. once you hit enter it should take you to a Hyperion user interface that we can use to make all the adjustments that we're going to need here so starting off we have a bunch of configurations that we're going to make here so we are on the dashboard which initially tells you your first led Hardware instance it'll confirm if your status is on or off component status you're capturing Hardware everything we're using here which is obviously disabled we're going to change all this so let's start off with General and here really I'm not going to touch this page but if you're planning on having this installed in your bedroom your living room in another room after that you're going to want to set up multiple configuration names and instant names but for me this says first led Hardware instance and I'm only planning on having this in the living room so I'm going to leave this as is next we're going to go to the LED instances and go to LED output from here this is where we're going to need to select our actual LEDs so if you go to controller type scroll up to the top you're going to see ws281x this is the 2812b LED strip that we bought I'm going to select that and it's going to ask you for your maximum LED count now this is where our account comes in earlier that I mentioned and I know that in total I actually have 258 so it was close to what we have here connected to the gpio number 18 pin everything else we're pretty much going to leave here and the hardware LED count we're going to set that to the same thing we're going to do 258. then we're going to hit save settings and it's going to give you this message here but it's only because we're not done so I'm just going to do continue we're going to go over to LED layout classic layout and this is where we can actually individually set everything so I have 82 LEDs on the top 82 LEDs on the bottom [Music] 47 going up sides and you're going to want to set an input position now the input position is pretty much where the data starts on your TV now this view that you're seeing here should be your television set and this is from looking at the screen not from looking behind the TV so I have mine placed let's see hit the arrow keys you should be able to move this I'm gonna go forward unfortunately you can't go backwards you're gonna go around the map here it's a monopoly and I actually have mine installed pretty much at the bottom of the screen like you guys saw so I'm going to leave mine right there and I think you have an option to reverse Direction but this is if your LED strip isn't working we have to test that first and make sure everything is set up so I'm not going to reverse the direction yet I'm going to save the LED layout and you'll see this time when we say we didn't have any issues so the next thing we're going to have to do is go down into our sources and you're going to see we have enabled screen capture USB capture and audio capture and they're all unchecked we're gonna have to change that by going into capturing Hardware we're going to go into USB capture check activate it's going to discover your device and you can see I have USB video here it's going to ask you your device resolution typically when you do your resolution you're going to want it to be as low as possible because you're not capturing the actual video You're capturing the colors so 640 by 480 by default for me is what I'm going to use but I am going to increase this to 30 frames per second you also have the option to crop everything but I'm just going to hit save settings from there and just to confirm we're going to go back into LED instances output LED layout and we're going to select live video here and now you can see that it is picking up something that is my Xbox I think it's sleeping let me see if I can unsleep it now that I fixed that you can actually see that it's picking up the visuals while we hear another thing worth noting is that you can actually switch the settings level of Hyperion so if you go into expert for example you're going to have tons of more options so if we go to our LED controller everything has kind of changed a little bit we have an option to invert our signal um change the RGB byte order which we are actually for this so instead of RGB we are going to do grb then after that we're just going to hit save settings and now we're going to go over to capturing Hardware your device discovered you're going to select the USB device from your Raspberry Pi it should be visible here and it's going to ask you your encoding format this doesn't matter device resolution for this you want to keep this as low as possible because we're not actually capturing the video we're just trying to capture the colors so 640x480 is good for me 30 frames per second is also good for me uh what else do we have here and we're also going to check signal detection after that we're just going to save the settings and let's scroll back up to the top and see what else we have the next thing we can do is head back over to LED instances go to image processing and you can see we can change the brightness or add brightness gain I'm actually going to add three to mine and then hit save and I think that would be good for me I'm pretty sure that's all the settings we have to change for now so what we're going to do is just reboot the system we can just open up putty real fast and then do sudo reboot and this should restart our pie and then we should notice that our lights are now working on our TV so let's go ahead and take a look and everything seems to be working pretty well I did put on a simple video here just to kind of showcase the tracking of the LEDs as they go with the image on the screen if you have any issues with this like let's say the image is on the left side of your screen but the right LEDs are lighting up you can reverse your signal to change that within the settings you can also go into the Hyperion settings click the magic wand icon at the top and you have an option for the RGB byte order wizard if you hit continue on this what it will do is make your TV flash this color or it'll change to Green in a few seconds and basically it'll just have you verify that when this color is written on here that'll actually show up on the screen so if it's red it's red if it's on your screen if it's green and it's red you'd select it here and this should change your issue but again what we just did earlier within the LED output um where was that right here the RGB byte order this would also fix it which is why I changed it to grb yeah let's get back to what we were looking at and I just want to showcase a couple of interesting things that really I think go off and and make this pop so I did record a couple of games just me moving around through certain ambient settings and let me tell you so far this has given me a new experience playing New York Arena of time it just gives it a whole new Vibe and I think makes it just a little more enjoyable and fun to play I also did record games like Skyrim for example you could see in this hallway the light Ambience of the room is actually going as I walk with my character and once I get to the darker part of the hall the lights turn off but when I use my flame spells in either my right hand or my left hand you're gonna see those corners of the screen actually light up and then if I do a shout see the whole TV light up and I think that's a really awesome effect and lastly I'm just going to show you guys a clip of this thunderstorm here and you can see the actual responsiveness of when the Lightning's coming out on the screen you can just the flash on the back of the TV I just think it's really awesome but I think I'm going to start wrapping the video up here if you guys run into any trouble leave a comment down below try to get back to you as soon as I can and that's it for me I will see you guys in the next video adios [Music] thank you

Channel: Below Average Gaming

Views: 30,633

Keywords: ambilight, ambilight tv, hyperion, hyperbian, diy ambilight tv, diy ambilight, raspberry pi, raspberry pi 3, cheap ambilight, ambient lighting, RGB, GRB, LED strips, ambilight diy, ambilight raspberry pi, raspberry pi ambilight, hyperion ambilight, ambilight tutorial, ambilight guide, below average gaming, reactive backlighting, How to make your own Hyperion ambilight gaming system

Id: -3ZkUdXBeqQ

Length: 23min 24sec (1404 seconds)

Published: Wed May 03 2023