Another project that I wanted to do like forever was an ambilight for my TV. I found great tutorials, the two that helped most (even though their Hyperion installation and configuration is outdated) are https://blog.monstermuffin.org/building-a-custom-ambilight-system-for-any-input-with-a-raspberry-pi-and-hyperion/ and https://www.digitec.ch/en/page/do-it-yourself-building-your-own-ambilight-7251.
A great (and recent) video tutorial is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urOEHzbV48A
The parts
Looking at all the parts that I needed and the price tag I decided to wait a bit more and ordered all the parts (minus the pi zero) from aliexpress.
- HDMI Splitter
- 5m WS2812B Led Strip
- USB2.0 Audio Video Capture Card
- DC Power Plug Connector 2.1mm x 5.5mm
- 2pcs Rca dual Male to male Coupler
- HDMI TO AV adapter
- 5V/10A power supply
The rest like USB power adaptor, Raspberry Pi Zero W, SD card and all the necessary cables I conveniently had lying around.
Soldering the Pi Zero
The LED strip came with two connectors: 1 with red and white cables for the power supply, and one with red, white and green cable.
From the connector with the 3 cables I soldered the green one to pin #12 (GPIO18) and the white one to pin #6 (GND). The red one I cut off so it could not come in the way.
I also soldered a 120 ohm resistor in between the green cable and pin #12. In some tutorials I read that they used a 100 ohm resistor, but I just had 82 ohm and 120 ohm resistors around so I went for the 120 ohm.
Some other tutorials also mention a level shifter, as the raspi works with 3.3V but the LED strip with 5V . Even others use an arduino for that purpose. For me the setup pictured below worked just with the resistor.
Hardware installation
At first, I thought I cut the LED strip and then solder the corners back together. But I saw many builds on the internet where they just bent the strip. This obviously saves lots of work.
Pi Zero Software
Installation of Hyperion on a Raspberry Pi is easiest if you just download the HyperBian image. It is a ready to use image for your Raspberry Pi. I added the ssh configuration plus the wifi setup so once I put the sd card into the zero and booted it up, I could access the Hyperion web interface on port 8090 of zero’s IP address.
I played around in the configuration, for example I set the RGB byte order to GRB and set the LED number in the LED layout section.
Under “Capturing Hardware” I checked the “Enable USB capture” check box. Apart from that I can’t really remember changing anything from the default setup. Pretty straightforward!