SensyLight – making home movie experience more immersive!

If you haven’t heard of ambiLight™ (probably trademarked) by Philips.
It was in their Televisions that somehow figure out the colours on the scene and light up the LEDs behind the TVs to create a more immersive experience. It was some how the thing of 2010 according to a friend of mine.

SensyLight is a DIY project which also tries to create a immersive movie experience with your TVs. But, can only be used with a PC that streams content to the TV on screen mirroring.

There are two components for this to work, one is the java program that runs on the PC and the other is the arduino C program that acquires the signals of the lighting information from the PC and creates an ambient lighting. This is expected to create an immersive experience. At least its fast enough for the frame rates of HD HDMI streaming. Checkout the youtube video that gives a outlook on the project.

Getting on to the hardware requirements for this setup:

1. Adafruit Industries – Neopixel 30 LED meter long Black
2. Arduino Mega 2650 to control the lights. They are communicating with the LEDs in a pulse modulate signal from the GPIOs
3. A PC with linux, windows or osX (then the serial interface setup might change)
   • Linux       –        /dev/ttyACM0
   • OSX         –        /dev/usbmodem14121
   • windwos –        COM6

Here is the best Über guide to help you get started with the Arduino and the RGB LEDs. (Tutorial)

There are two Github repositories at the moment to serve the two parts of the code.

• sensyLight-Java
• sensyLight-Arduino

To run the setup:

1. Install the Java Runtime Environment – JRE –  windows 64bit, windows 32bit
2. Clone the repo sensyLight-Java
3. The “dist” folder has the bundled version of sensyLight for Windows.
   • if its a different operating system or COM port.
   • Line 43 SerialInit("COM6");The default serial interface is COM6
   • You should build the jar again. This will be a command line argument in the future release.
4. connect the Arduino to PC. Power it up.
5. Flash the Program from this repository – sensyLight-Arduino
6. If you already followed the über guide, you should already have a working setup with the LEDs
7. open the command line and run the following code
   • cd into the directory
     cd /path/to/dir/sensiLight-Java/
   • run the program
     java -jar dist/sensyLight.jar