Quick and Dirty Ambilight

Controlling software for Art.NET, DMX etc.

Apr 28, 2022

Art-Net, sACN/E1.31, and DMX512 are the most commonly used lighting control protocols with roots in simple theatrical lights. These days almost any lighting or stage effect equipment may be controlled using these protocols including moving lights, LED screens, fog machines, and laser displays.

I’ve been working with addressable LEDs for a while but recently I had an epiphany, or to put it better, I realized that my current lighting setup can do much more than just do scrolls.

Barn Lab

Art-net, WS2812 and ESP-01

Ever since it first came to the market in 2014 the Espressif Systems chip ESP8266 has become the favorite WiFi enabled microcontroller. When it came out there were no mentions of it online except in the HackaDay article but today, there are millions of articles and projects that are based on this chip or its successors like ESP32…

4 years ago · Ivan Rogoz

Some time ago I made my own Ambilight but got to tear it down to reuse on another project. I really liked it but never got to remake it again. This changed a couple of days ago while watching a movie. I started thinking about Ambilight and how I miss it, then I remembered my recreation of a peripheral vision project done by Robert Xiao, Carnegie Mellon University, and Hrvoje Benko, Microsoft Research, and how I used Processing to sample screen color and map that to RGB ring. If anyone is interested full article about how to recreate it can be found on Instructables.

That got me thinking if I could use that code to drive my back table lights and … no. The firmware I use on my ESP01 is not compatible with the Adalight way of doing things. I was ready to abandon the project as it was supposed to be quick and easy and I didn’t plan on spending a lot of time on it but on a hunch, I went back to my control software of choice, Jinx! , free available software for controlling LED matrices. The last update was in 2016 but for free software, it has all the features and supports all protocols I care about; Art-Net, sACN (E1.31), tpm2.net, tpm2, Glediator protocol, and MiniDMX as well as real DMX ( Enttec OpenDMX USB and Enttec USB DMX Pro compatible interfaces).

Checked the input options, and found one I never used before, Screen Capture.

And voila. After clicking on Select Screen Region you get a window that you resize to the region of the screen you wish to capture and transfer to the LED matrix, and that’s it, a simple Ambilight.