win-ambilight

An ambient light for Windows 11.

For Linux(Wayland) use tdakhran/wl-ambilight.

For Linux(X11) use josh26turner/Ambilight.

Hardware

arduino IDE compatible device
FastLED compatible LED strip and power supply for it
USB cable

Software

There are 2 parts:

arduino driver - receives LED color information via USB from PC service and controls LEDs
PC service - computes LED color information and sends it to arduino driver

How does it work?

sequenceDiagram
participant LEDStrip
participant Arduino
PCService->>Windows: screen capture request
Windows->>PCService: screen data
Note over PCService: Compute LED colors
PCService->>Arduino: Send LED colors over USB
Arduino->>LEDStrip: update colors over DATA PIN

Usage

Wiring

Glue LED strip (I used WS2812B 60LED/m) to the back side of the monitor. Cut and solder the parts together. I used ESP32 as an Arduino device and attached it as well to the monitor. The monitor has a built-in USB hub and ESP32 is connected to it. The power supply I use for LEDs has specs 5V 40W.

Build

Use Arduino IDE to build a driver from arduino folder.

Use cargo build --target x86_64-pc-windows-gnu to build PC service in WSL2.

Launch

Launch win-ambilight.exe run -p COM3 -m 1. Works on Windows 11.

Issues

Known

None.

Unknown

A lot. PRs are welcome.

tdakhran/win-ambilight