Ambilight / Atmolight

[maxmustermann]

that sounds very promising. still didnt try to hack my TV, because i dont own a Ex-Link cable at the moment. When it comes to that i will try it with this method since internet@TV doesnt seem to be working with newer version ( I remember to have accepted the last update the TV suggested), maybe I will try it even without Ex-link.
Do i understand it right, that after the hack i will be able to run scripts from the connected USB - Stick and all of the available SamyGo applications ( which were made for C650 ) and have access to all the necessary parts and modules and so on like there PVR stream or framebuffers?

My thoughts about USB/LAN/RS223/UART transport of calculated values to the microcontroller:

if i am not wrong the TV sends already over UART so it should be possible to connect the microcontroller directly to RX and TX pins of the VGA port without any converting to USB or any another protocol. I am just thinking about using my Arduino-board for the developing purposes. But this is far far away in the future

[erdem_ua]

USB is prefered way for me because it also give electricity to board!. Also you can use soft-USB protocol to arduino Or there is some cheap Teensy boards which has hardware USB transceiver it it...

[maxmustermann]

oh man, there is so much interesting hardware out there... ( teensy )

[erdem_ua]

Yup
Also ATTiny's are amazing. Look here.

[bege]

To control the backlight LEDs you need an external microcontroller. Questin is how to spilt the required computing power between the TVs CPU and this external device.
As there are many cheap, for example ARM based, controllers with USB and several DMPIS of computing power availavble today, it would be possible to let the TV just transfer the interesting (edge) parts of a captured image to such a contoller via USB.
The controller then can do most of the work like decode the image data, convert color schemes, calculate mean values for the different fields and at least provide a PWM signal to all of the LEDs of the A***light.

Not every 50/100Hz frame needs to be processed. It would be sufficient to transfer one or two frames per second. The controller needs to fade LEDs to avoid too much fickering.

But first step is to be able capture the screen data and transfer it to an external device.

Lot's of work and know how of embedded systems required but it should be possible.

Bege

[Knochi]

Hi

any progress on that? I have a UE40C6990 and it would be great if I can use something similar to ambilight with the normal TV program and internal Mediaplayer.
There are a lot of projects that can grab the SCART or even HDMI data and process the signal but none of them is able to grab from the TV direct.

Philips has introduced an App where you can even add your HUE Lamps with the ambilight of the TV.
Google Playstore

Wouldn't it be great if one can hook up Hue Lamps via Software to Samsung TV?

[AmbiZOL]

Hi, brainstormers,

It could be a great to make the tv output the picture not only onto screen but also over USB or Ethernet (may be in downgraded resolution). Does this theme has any further continuation?

[AmbiZOL]

Ok. Seems to be it'll be one man fight...
Nevertheless, here is the plan:
1.Arduino part is ready. Already can transfer pixels state from pc.
2.Next step is to write some code for tv which transfers byte array over USB. Seems it will be not the hardest part. This discussion was already started at the beginning of the thread.
3.Third step is to patch tv internal player or use access to the video buffer. For me player patching seems a more promising. But as soon as I only at the beginning of the road it needs a lot of studying.

[kartu]

Hi AmbiZOL,

I''m also after ambilight, but will probably start with attaching it to Enigma2 STB first (there is finished software that does it).
I use this site as a guide: http://www.boblightenigma2.net/

With STB it works as follows:
a plugin code that calculates pixel color/brightness runs on STB (I think it isn't using boblight code anymore / or using is improved faster version)
arduino is connected to STB over USB and basically repeats data it receives from USB via SPI.

When connecting it directly to usb port of a TV, most important part is probably getting access to the framebuffer, then writing native program that would calculate pixel color.
I doubt transferring all pixels over USB, mentioned earlier in this thread would work, but 600Mhz ARM should do fine.