You know Philips Ambilight? This is my attempt at that. Read about Ambilight here.
The Python half of this project should work on Linux/Mac/Windows. The most probable point of failure would be the platform's inability to tak screenshots. When run on non-Windows, pyscreenshot is used to grab the screen. On my windows machine this leads to about 3 FPS, which is much worse than the 15FPS I get with Pillow.
WS28* RGB LED strip attached to some sort of Arduino that has a serial connection to your PC. The strip should of course have sufficient power to operate at full white. The data line should be connected to pin 6 of your Arduino, although feel free to change the Arduino source to accomodate your hardware configuration.
Python libraries:
pillow
pyserial
pyscreenshot
multiprocessing
Run install.bat on Windows or install.sh on Linux to install them.
Upload the arduino program found in pc_rgb_controller to your arduino.
Make sure to install the dependencies. Please.
There's a GUI now! Run gui.pyw to use it. Beware that there is a performance hit from using it and it will require you to have multiprocessing. I'm working on the performance and don't yet know why performance is so much worse with the GUI.
Run the appropriate launch script for your OS: run.sh for *nix and run.bat for Windows.
If you have multiple serial devices connected the command line interface asks you to choose one.
Make sure to choose the serial port connected to your Arduino.
Enjoy!
Short video demo, click to open:
The Python pillow library is used to grab a screenshot of the desktop. That screenshot is then sliced it into vertical strips, the strips are resizedinto 1x1 thumbnails.
That RGB values of those thumbnails are packed/serialized into integers which are sent to the Arduino via pyserial.
The loop() checks for a integer sent over serial connection, unpacks/deserializes the RGB values from it and writes that color to the whole strip.
There are also ways to write colors to individual pixel.
Integers sent over serial should be separated by newlines.
A state machine diagram of the arduino input system:
An example command to the 'duino might look like this: 16777215. A single positive integer sent over serial will be interpreted as a "packed" RGB value. That particular value is (255,255,255), or white.
Another command, -1\n16711680\n65280 does a couple of things. The first number, -1 puts the 'duino in 2-color mode, after which it looks for two more numbers, which are the 16711680 and 65280. Notice that they are separated by newlines.
Eventually I will add some sort of command structure so that more complex animations can be triggered and controlled by the PC.