The ULTIMATE Guide to Building an Ambilight TV with Hyperion

ambilight tvs are one of my favorite diy projects that you can do for your smart home they add a whole new dimension to watching your favorite movies add some nice ambient light pun intended to your living room can help reduce strain on your eyes and it just looks freaking cool today we're going to be covering the definitive guide to making your own ambilight tv project with everything you need to know from start to finish hey guys and welcome back to another tech tutorial tuesday ever since i made the first ambulant tv video where i showed you my exact setup you guys have been asking and asking for a full detailed guide on how to make that setup so finally that video is here today we will cover absolutely everything you need to know from picking out your hardware to installing it to configuring the software to make your own ambilight tv if you haven't seen that first video yet do make sure to check out because i give you some of my own personal experiences and put more personal detail on my exact setup and how i actually use it this video will be split up into three sort of distinct sections first i will go over the hardware selection and choices then we'll cover how to install all of that hardware and then finally the software configuration in order to tie everything together there is a ton of information to cover in this video so let's first dive into the hardware selection after a word from our sponsor pcbway way offers a fully featured custom pcb printing service that can help you turn custom projects into a reality with lots of different materials and options to suit your needs and they offer so much more than just pcb printing services but everything you need to take your project from start to finish from pcb assembly 3d printing cnc machining injection molding and more all for a highly competitive price so if you need help creating your next custom electronics project check out pcboa using the link in the video description so for this video there are quite a few parts that you're going to need some are essential and some are optional depending on your setup and your needs the things that are essential are a raspberry pi and an sd card an led strip a capture card a power supply to power the whole setup some wiring and some female barrel jack connectors i'm going to have links to absolutely everything you will need in the description down below which does help support the channel firstly let's talk about the raspberry pi choices for the original video i did i was using a raspberry pi 3b which works very well but since i'm installing a new hyperion setup on my bedroom tv for this video i'm going to try out the pi zero w which is capable of running hyperion the concern with the pi zero is its cpu working with anything video related is always really intensive and the pi zero doesn't have a strong cpu clearly it's a 10-pound board after all i can tell you that the pi zero does work for hyperion after some tweaking and so far it seems responsive enough but it really is on its limits as far as resources go if you're someone that who is extremely sensitive to latency like i am i would probably recommend going for a pi 3 or pi 4 personally if you can afford to do so you'll also need an sd card for your pi it doesn't need to be anything high capacity but just make sure it's a good quality class 10 card the led strip i'm using for this project is the ws 2812b which is a 5 volt led strip making it ideal for pairing with the pi since the pi also runs at 5 volts meaning we can use one single power supply to power the entire setup without doing any voltage step downs or anything like that there is also the newer sk6812 led strip which is a good choice also and it is also 5 volts but it's a bit more expensive than the ws2812b but it does have a white led channel included whereas the ws 2812 is rgb only so that may be something to consider the strips come in varying amounts of leds per meter the most common are 30 leds per meter 60 leds per meter and 144 leds per meter i would personally recommend going for the 60 led per meter that gives you the best of the looks but also the best in terms of power consumption remember if you go for 144 leds per meter then you could potentially more than doubling your power consumption and therefore the size of your power supply which we're going to talk about in just a minute so the recommendation would be to stick to a 60 leds per meter you also need to work out how many meters of strip you will need and the easiest way to find this out is just to measure around the outside of the frame of your tv the strips usually come in five meter lengths but if you need more than that you will need to either solder strips together or extend them using pre-made clips sometimes they can be quite flaky these clips so if you can solder them it is better to do so but just something to um take into consideration just for reference on my 50 inch tv i used about four meters of led strip and it's fairly close to the very edge of the frame capture card is the hardest choice for this entire setup because there are some things to keep in mind and you'll also need to make a choice for what you want specifically for your needs i spoke in the other video about how i consume almost all of my media on one of the new google tvs which has 4k and hdr support and i wanted to retain that functionality and reading the comments from a lot of you guys on that video i was also surprised to see that a lot of you also want to keep 4k hdr2 which is really cool so if you want to retain the 4k hdr then you need to make sure that your capture card supports 4k hdr passthrough passthrough is just like it sounds the capture card basically has three ports on it a hdmi in a hdmi out and a usb port the hdmi in and out are capable of 4k hdr so whatever signal you input in will be passed through to your tv so that the source remains unchanged the usb port is what does the capturing and this is done at 1080p which is more than enough for hyperion to work with if you don't need 4k hdr then you can save some money on a capture card by getting a card that has a 1080p passthrough the capture card that i'm using for both of my tvs is this one from zas luke which is a 4k hdr pass-through model and the name does seem to change depending on which country you're in again i'll have everything linked down below but try and look for one that looks like this if you want to try and have the same functionality that i do the other important thing to consider when choosing a capture card is to make sure that it supports htcp 2.2 and this is what makes it work with things like netflix or amazon prime if your capture card doesn't support htcp then you will get a black screen whenever you try to view content from netflix because of the copyright protection again if you don't watch or use these uh sources or consume that type of media then you don't need to worry about that at all um it's only for if you want to watch things with copyright protection on it okay so power supplies now power supplies come in all different shapes and sizes from little wall plug ones to bigger ones with the brick to the much bigger industrial looking ones for this particular setup i'm going to be using the power brick ones which you can generally find give you up to about 10 amps the amount of amperage you'll need is entirely dependent on how big of an led strip you have and how many leds per meter the general rule of thumb is that floats around the internet is about 60 milliamps per led so if you have 60 leds per meter and you have four meters of strip then that's 300 leds so if you do 0.06 multiplied by 300 that gives you 18 amps however this measurement assumes that all of the leds will be at pure white which draws the most amount of power and so generally you can get away with much less than that for my project i used a 10 amp power supply for 300 leds and i've had absolutely zero issues and i know others use much less than that also but i'm going to leave some resources in the description box down below to quindor's website who gives a much more in-depth uh and detailed look on power supplies than i have the knowledge to do and i'll also leave a link to a dr z's video too which also has some really good information on power supplies finally we're also going to need some short bits of wire which will connect the gpio pins on our raspberry pi to the led strip and also to the power supply i typically use these dupont connectors just because they're super quick and easy to use but you can use any bit of wire that you have you'll also need a sacrificial micro usb cable which we're going to cut up and you'll need a female barrel jack connector which we will use to connect to the power supply we're also going to need something to stick the pie to the tv i kind of like the 3m velcro strips i joked in the previous video how it was just temporary but they've actually come in quite useful since i've removed the pie quite a number of times now to borrow it for other temporary projects so definitely useful to be able to stick it to the tv and remove it wherever you need to earlier i mentioned an optional bit of hardware and that is a hdmi splitter if you have multiple sources that you want to feed into the ambilights such as a chromecast and a blu-ray player or an xbox and a ps5 then you'll want to grab a hdmi splitter which will allow you to have multiple sources all feeding into the capture card that you can switch between again you'll need to make sure that these fit your exact needs by having 4k hdr support as well as hdcp 2.2 where applicable all right so that was a lot of talk about different hardware and it can be a lot to take in if you're just getting started and it's hard for me to give you an exact definitive list of this is what you will need because everyone's set up very but the key thing is to just make sure and double check everything is compatible with each other and if you're not sure then make sure to jump into our discord server we have an amazing community of people who like to discuss smart home and other cool related projects i'm sure we can definitely help you out link is down below so now we have discussed hopefully all of the hardware you will need we can now talk about the software and at the center of all this is some free open source software called hyperion and that is what is running on our raspberry pi hyperion is basically taking the image from the capture card analyzing what's on the screen and then controlling the led strip in response to that on-screen image now stick with me here as things might get a little bit confusing i've been calling this hyperion for this whole time throughout this entire video and the last video but it's actually not technically hyperion i am using but rather another similar project called hyper hdr what type of hdr is is a fork of hyperion with hdr features also built in this is necessary because if you watch hdr content using hyperion you'll notice that the leds are much dimmer and the colors are more washed out than what is on screen and that's because regular hyperion does not have hdr support and so it doesn't support the hdr color space and so colors seem to be very dull and muted because it doesn't know how to handle that color space so hyper hdr is literally hyperion with hdr support built in and when i say they are identical i do mean they are pretty much identical the ui is exactly the same all of the buttons are the same in both hyperion and hyper hdr it's just that hyper hdr has some additional buttons to handle hdr content and it understands the rec 2020 or hdr color space now you can also use hyper hdr for non-hdr content and so it's up to you if you want to use hyperion or hyper hdr i'll be showing you hyper hdr but everything i'll show you is pretty much the exact same setting in hyperion and i'll be sure to point out anything that is different also going forward i'm just going to call it hyperion from now on just to keep things simple but you get what i mean all right now let's get on with the actual installation section so first things first you're going to want to test out your pi before going ahead and sticking it onto the tv so let's prepare the os first using a windows computer you will want to download a raspberry pi imager from the raspberry pi website and install it it's also available on mac os and linux once downloaded and installed insert your sd card to your computer and then click the choose os button and select raspberry pi os other and then select raspberry pi os lite you can choose the full version if you want to but i would recommend saving as much cpu and memory resources as you can and going with the lite version then click the choose storage button and select your sd card make sure to choose the right disk gear as it will be formatted and all data wiped clean from it then hit the right button and let the process begin which should only take a few minutes once done remove the sd card and then reinsert it back into your windows machine we aren't quite done with it yet because we need to add our wi-fi details and also enable ssh to do this open up the boot partition on the sd card and then create a new file called wpa supplicant.conf make sure to remove the dot txt extension at the end then you're going to paste in this information for your wi-fi details and i'll make sure to have this linked in the video description make sure to change your country and add your ssid and password for your wi-fi details then save the file and create another new file called ssh with no extension this time just ssh no need to edit the file this time it's just blank what will happen now is when we power up the pi it will see these two files and it will connect to wi-fi and it will also enable ssh for us so that we can access our pi without any display or keyboard plugged in these files will be deleted after initial boot so no security risk there then you can remove the sd card from your computer and plug it into your pi and power it up give it a good couple of minutes to start up and then you're going to want to use an ssh client of your choice to connect your pie i recommend putty since it's super lightweight and simple to use but you can use any you like once you have putty downloaded open it and then you should be able to type raspberry pi into the box and hit enter if it works you will be prompted for a username if it doesn't work and it says host not found try entering raspberrypi.local instead and if that still isn't working then you'll need to take a look at your router and figure out the ip address of your raspberry pi and then enter that into the box instead once you are connected use the username pi and the password raspberry to log in i would recommend changing this password for security reasons once you have everything set up then from there head to the github link in the description where i have created a file for you with a couple of commands that will install hyperion aka hyper hdr copy everything in this file and paste it into the box and hit enter and sit back and wait for a few minutes while your pi downloads and installs hyperion once done at the bottom you should see a message saying that hyperion has been installed and is running and at this point you can go to a browser and type in raspberry pi colon 80 90 and hit enter and the hyperion web page should show up if it does this is great head back to your terminal and then type sudo shutdown and now and hit enter this will power the pi down and you are now free to remove the power and then we can get on with installing our led strip and all of the other hardware to the tv at your tv first thing we're going to want to do is to prepare our led strip with the exact size that we need now if you need a larger size than five meters to fit your tv then you have some extra work to do by extending two strips i'm not going to be showing you that here because i'm not fortunate enough to have that problem where i need more than five meters but basically you need to just join two strips together by soldering the contact points using some short pieces of wire for the rest of us to measure how much led strip we need take the led strip and place it around the outside edge of the frame of the tv as close to the edge as possible without being visible for the best effect and then cut the led strip to size using the cut points on the strip i would suggest leaving a little bit more than you actually need here just in case and then you can go back and trim it afterwards before you start sticking anything down you'll first want to wipe down your surface for dust so that the led strip can adhere to the surface properly and then you'll also want to figure out where you want to place the capture card and the raspberry pi so that you can figure out where you want to start and end the led strip so that it's easy to wire everything try to keep your pie relatively close to the end of your led strip if possible so that the wires are short once you've kind of visualized that roughly then it's time to start sticking the led strip down i'm going to be showing you what i like to call the smart man method of applying the led strip some have coined it the lazy person way no idea why that might be when you get to the corner you can fold the corners over onto itself so that you can turn the 90 degrees if you want to do it the proper way you can then either cut it at the corners and solder the wires or you can cut and use some right angle connectors but i don't personally find these all that reliable and the smartman method has been working for me so far so that's what i'm going with again for this build once the led strip is stuck down you can then start to stick down the rest of your components on the setup i'm doing here again i'm just using some 3m velcro to stick down my pie again this is 100 without a doubt just a temporary solution i would never in a million years leave it like this for this particular setup i'm using some velcro tie wraps to tie my capture card onto my tv mount but you can use the 3m command hooks to stick the capture card down then we can start to wire everything up you'll want to connect to the usb cable of the capture card to the usb port on your pi make sure that if you're using a pi zero that you connect it to the data port and not the power port then connect your source media through your chromecast or your blu-ray player or set-top box for example to the hdmi input on the capture card and the hdmi output on the capture card to your tv if you're using a hdmi splitter so that you can have multiple sources using hyperion then you will want to connect the output from that to your capture card input and then the rest of the wiring is the same now it's time to connect the power and the led strip first cut up your micro usb cable and expose the red and black wires which are the five volts and ground wires the reason for using a usb cable here instead of wiring to the pi gpio pins is that because the micro usb port on the pi is wired to a fuse which will protect it from over voltage whereas the gpio pins have no protection so it makes sense to use the micro usb port just in case if you decide not to use the micro usb port or you power it with its own power supply then you need to ensure that you have a common ground between the led strip and the pi otherwise the led strip will flash like crazy take the red wire from the usb cable as well as the red wire from the led strip and connect these into the positive terminal of the female barrel jack connector then take the black wire from the usb cable and the white wire from the led strip and connect them to the negative terminal the ground wire on the led strip may be black or it may be white but the positive should always be red a quick note here is that your led strip may have two sets of wires three that go into a black connector and two that are bare wires the red wire and the white wire from both sets are the exact same wire so it's up to you which one you choose just make sure to not connect them both at the same time finally connect the data wire which is the last remaining wire on the strip in my case it is green and connect that to the gpio18 pin on your pi make sure to look up the gpio diagram for your model of pi to double check the pin out then that's it for the installation and the wiring and we can now power everything on double check your wiring one last time and then you can plug in the power supply to the end of your barrel jet connector and if it all goes well your pi should light up final thing you'll want to do is a really fun process and that is to count the exact number of leds you have on the back of your tv making sure to note down how many are on the top bottom left and right sides in total because my strip started at the top in the middle then i also note how many are in between the split because this will be important in just a minute now we can move on and set up hyperion so once your pi has powered up you will want to log in to the hyperion web interface like we did earlier using raspberry pi followed by port 80 90. once logged in the first thing you'll want to do is to head up to the top right hand side and hit the settings level button and change it to expert then head to configuration and general and rename the configuration and also the instance name to something that makes sense to you so bedroom tv in my case then we want to configure our led so head to led hardware and in the led controller tab from controller type drop down choose ws2812b under the pwm section if you are using another strip like sk6812 then make sure to select that option instead now enter the total number of leds that you obtained earlier in both of these boxes make sure the gpio pin number is set to 18 which is the default and then hit save your settings then move over to the led layout tab and this is where we need to configure how many leds are on each side enter the total number of leds for the top bottom left and right sides and this is configured as if you were looking at the screen and not from behind the tv if you started your led strip in the middle of one of the edges like i did rather than at a corner then you'll need to use the input position field using the number of leds on either side of the split so in my case i have 66 leds at the top 33 on the left of the split and 33 on the right of the split so my input position becomes 33 make sure to pay attention to the led visualizer on the right hand side which should help you make sure that you have everything in the correct order and the other thing to take a note of here is the reverse direction option if you find that your leds are kind of a mirror image and flipped then you can use that option to fix it make sure to hit the save button and now there is one final thing we need to do with the leds and that's to figure out which order the rgb channels are in in the top right hand corner hit the little wand option button and then choose the rgb byte order wizard and basically you need to watch which color is displayed on your strip and then enter the correct information in the box in both of the led strips that i've configured so far the red and green options have been reversed so they are grb also the good news is here that if you were able to go through the wizard and your led strip lights up then that means that your led strip is working properly which is great if your led strips don't light up then you will want to double check the settings and also the wiring finally we can now make sure the capture card is set correctly so head over to capture hardware and then make sure to enable the capture card at the top then under the devices section choose your capture card from the drop down and then set a resolution the resolution you are going to set here kind of depends on which pi you are using since i am using the pi zero for this build we really need to try and optimize performance as much as possible i found that using 960 by 540 resolution works really well here and you could also go down to 800 by 450 here too and i know what you're thinking you want all of the resolution i get it i totally hear you but remember that this is just the resolution that is being captured and is more than plenty enough for hyperion to work if you're using a pi 3 or 4 here then you can definitely get away with using 720p as your resolution that's what i use on my first capture card and that works perfectly then set your frames per second to 30 and then further down tick the signal detection box and then further down again we have the software frame skipping option now this is a hyper hdr option only this doesn't appear in hyperion so just be aware of that but what this does is basically make the responsiveness on the pi zero so much better if you're using a pi three or four then you can just leave this set to one as that will work perfectly fine without it but if you are using the pi zero like i am then i found find setting this to 3 seems to work perfectly this will basically tell the pi to only process every third frame which helps the slower cpu to manage to keep up with the demand i want to point out this one final option to you and that is the hdr to sdr tone mapping and you'll probably want to enable this if you don't have any hdr content at all and you don't plan to use any hdr content obviously this is a hyper hdr option only then save your settings the last page we need to check out is the image processing tab and the only thing i like to change here is the black bar detector at the very bottom which i will enable this will make hyperion work with movies that have black bars at the top otherwise the top and bottom leds will be turned off if you don't have this option enabled hit save and then at this point i would suggest rebooting your pie one thing i found is that making some changes to the capture card settings only seem to take effect after you reboot so whenever i make changes like that i do tend to reboot the pi this time when the pi starts up your leds will probably do a rainbow effect and this is a really nice little validation so that you know your leds are functioning correctly log back into the web interface and then in the top right hand corner there is this little display icon hit that and then you can get a live view of what the capture card is seeing which is really useful for debugging now it's worth noting that this will be significantly delayed to what is on screen and to what the capture card is actually seeing but it's still really useful for making sure that your capture card is working now what that's left to do is to fire up some content and check out how it looks the first video you've got to try out is of course the philips lightweight demo uhd video which is a really cool demo of tons of different colors i also really like this video called magic fluids hdr by roman which has some really nice colors it has some slow paced and fast paced moving images and is really good for checking out the alignment of leds another favorite is of course an absolute classic video called a transient and the sequel transient 2 by dustin farrell and this is an absolutely stunning short film that you absolutely must check out even if you're not using hyperion you must check this out the lightning looks absolutely incredible on hyperion and it's an absolutely stunning short film the last thing i'll show you how to do is to add hyperion to home assistant if you don't use a home assistant then you can skip this step but if you do then you're going to want to head over to configuration and then integration and hit the add button and search for hyperion in the box simply enter the ip address or hostname of your hyperion setup and hit the ok button and home assistant should connect right up this gives you the option to automatically turn the ambi light off when your tv isn't in use or turn on for certain types of content and you can also change the effects here too you can do some really useful automations using home assistant here and that's pretty much it you should now have a fully functioning ambilight setup and you can now kick back chuck on your favorite film and enjoy it from a whole new perspective and this really does bring a new dimension to films that really adds to the experience and it doesn't actually take that much getting used to but then when you do turn it off you really do miss it and that's about all the time we have for this video i know this was a highly highly requested video that took a little bit of time to get to but there is so much information to get across and tried to pull together that it did take quite a long time to make this video so hopefully i did it justice hopefully you guys enjoyed it hopefully you have hyperion up and running and hopefully all made sense make sure to send me your setups on twitter tag me in your photos of your setups of what you make with hyperion i love seeing all of your setups over there it's so cool seeing what everyone does with all of these videos so rewarding and yeah leave me a comment down below if you plan on making a hyperion setup for yourself or maybe you've already made one let me know in the comments down below as always love hearing from you guys if you want to support this channel you can do so by becoming a patreon on patreon and your support allows me to keep on making videos just like this one thank you to all my current patreon supporters as always your support is highly highly appreciated make sure to drop this video a like and get subscribed and i will see you in the next video show

Channel: Everything Smart Home

Views: 40,468

Keywords: ambilight, hyperion, raspberry pi, ambilight tv, ambilight demo, philips ambilight, hyperhdr, hyperion tv, diy ambilight tv, philips hue ambilight, philips hue syncbox, philips hue sync box, diy ambilight, hyperion ambilight tv, RGB TV, bias lighting tv, home assistant hyperion, smart home, home automation, cheap ambilight, bias lighting, tv lighting

Id: J26oYlKyq7Q

Length: 31min 30sec (1890 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 29 2021