Guide

amblone setup
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DIY Guide for Amblone LED Light

In order to create the Amblone setup, you will need the Amblone software, an Arduino microcontroller, a USB A to B cable, RGB LED strips, transistors, resistors, a 12V adapter, and electrical wires. You will also need doublesided tape or another means of mounting the LED strips.

If you have read over the guide and still have some questions to ask, check out the Amblone FAQ page as there is a good chance that there are the answers you will need over there!

What you need for Amblone DIY Led Light

– Amblone software

– An Arduino microcontroller

– We recommend the Arduino Mega

– A USB A to B cable -RGB LED strips that can be manually controlled- make sure to avoid LED strips that automatically change colors

– Transistors and resistors (you will need three times as many as the number of LED strips you have)

– A 12V adapter (or whatever voltage your LED strips require)

– Electrical wires -Double-sided tape or another method of mounting the LED strips

Getting started building your Amblone Light

Do you want to build your own Amblone? Great! You’ll need an Arduino microcontroller. These are ideal for hobbyists because they’re affordable, easy to program, and offer a lot of options for input and output devices.

There are many different variations of Arduino, so you can choose the one you think is best for your goals. The only thing that’s very important is the number of PWM outputs the Arduino has. For every RGB channel you have (LED strip or lamp), you will need 3 PWMs (one for red, one for green, and one for blue).

The Amblone PC software currently supports up to 4 channels, so an Arduino Mega is a very good choice, since it has 14 PWMs. You will need a male A to male B USB cable for the communication between the PC and the Arduino Mega. We bought our Arduino at ge-th, or actually via their eBay store, and it was a positive experience.

We ordered the Arduino Mega for a very reasonable price, the shipping was pretty quick, and it also came with a USB cable. It’s also possible to order Arduinos unassembled, so you can build it yourself!

The most important consideration for your RGB lighting setup is the type of lighting you’ll be using. RGB LED strips are a popular option, but some projects have also been completed using CCFLs, LED lamps, and separate LED lights.

You can purchase RGB LED strips from online retailers like Deal Extreme or Lightake. Keep in mind that the quality of products from these companies may not be the best, but their prices are often very competitive.

When using RGB LED strips, you’ll need a separate 12V adapter to power the strips, as well as transistors to control the current. The number and type of transistors you’ll need will depend on the configuration of your RGB lights.

Our LED strips have one shared positive connection and individual negative connections for each color, so we only needed one transistor for each red, green, and blue connection. With three LED strips, we needed a total of nine transistors.

Many people want to install LED light strips around the edges of their television sets in order to give the screen a ‘glowing’ effect. This can be done relatively easily, but there are a few things you will need in order to do it properly.

What’s needed to setup your LED lights as a backlight for TV

– LED strips

– A power supply

– Electrical wiring

– Double sided tape First, decide where you want to place the LED strips on your TV.

Then, attach the strips to the TV using double sided tape. Next, run the electrical wiring from the power supply to the LED strips. Finally, turn on the power supply to test the backlight.

Step 1: Soldering and wiring

It is important to note that the steps required in this section will vary depending on the type of light source that is chosen. For example, our LED strips have a shared positive and an individual negative for the red, green, and blue channels.

However, if your light source is different, the corresponding circuit diagram and components required may also differ. Therefore, it is essential to ensure that you are using the correct circuit diagram and components before beginning in order to avoid any damage to your Arduino board, your dog, or the light source.

The Arduino Mega has a number of Pulse Width Modulation (PWM) outputs. For each LED strip, we need to connect the red, green and blue wire to one of these outputs. Channel one uses pins 2 to 4, where pin 2 is red, pin 3 is green and pin 4 is blue.

Channel two uses pins 5 to 7, where pin 5 is red, pin 6 is green and pin 7 is blue. However, the Arduino itself does not have the power to drive the LED strips and we will need an extra power source that powers the LED strips. A 12V, 1A adapter will be sufficient. We will also need a resistor and a transistor for each red, green and blue wire.

The circuit for this project is very simple. All you need to do is connect the output of your Arduino to a resistor, and then connect the resistor to the base of a transistor. Next, connect the emitter of the transistor to the ground of the Arduino, and the collector to the corresponding colour of the LED strip.

Repeat this process for all the RGB wires. Finally, connect the positive terminal of the LED strips to the positive terminal of the 12V adapter, and the negative terminal of the 12V adapter to the ground of the Arduino.

Micah Riddell designed the circuit diagram for the ULN2003A chip before building the physical board. The ULN2003A chip can be ordered from a variety of places, including www.hobbytronics.co.uk/uln2003a-darlington-array?keyword=Uln2003A.

We soldered everything onto a small piece of print, and also used some headers to be able to disconnect different parts if need be, but of course you could just solder everything together.

Arduino enthusiast Andrew Cox has created a very professional-looking case for his Arduino using an old ADSL modem case and ethernet cables as power cables for the LED strips. You can see the result in the picture below, or check out his fritzing project for more pictures and to see how you can do this yourself.

Step 2: Arduino Software

In order to run the Arduino software, you will first need to download it from arduino.cc/en/Main/Software. Once you have the software, you will need to open it using the Arduino environment, which can be found at arduino.cc/en/Guide/Windows.

Once you have the environment open, select the correct Arduino model by going to Tools > Board and select Arduino Mega. Also select the right COM port under Tools > Serial Port. After everything is set up, hit the Upload button to load the code onto the Arduino.

Once the code is loaded, the Arduino will automatically start running the program. If it is ever powered off, it will start up again automatically as soon as it is powered back on.

Step 3: Windows Software

Now, we will download the Amblone Windows software. You can either choose to download the binaries, or the sources and compile it yourself. When you start Amblone, a tray icon will appear in the system tray. Right click the tray icon, and select ‘Configure Amblone’.

Here you can set some options, of which two are important at this moment. First of all, select the monitor that you want to take the average color from, and specify the RGB channels you are using, and which screen section they should represent.

For example, if you have an RGB LED strip located at the top of your TV screen, which is selected as the second monitor, and the LED strip is connected to output pins 2 to 4, you will have to select ‘Secondary Monitor’ under Source Monitor, and the section of the screen you want the strip to represent under Channel 1. This will probably be ‘upper half’ or ‘entire screen’.

Amabrone is a powerful, yet easy to use coloured light controller for PC. It uses an Arduino board to control the colour and brightness of LED strips.The first thing you need to do is choose the orientation of the LED strips. You can either make them represent the lower left corner, or the lower right corner.

Next, you need to select the COM port that the Arduino is connected to on your PC. Once you have done this, Amabrone will automatically start communicating with the Arduino. If everything is working correctly, you should see the LED strips emitting the colours that you have specified.

Step 3.2: Finetuning the software

Everything working as it should? Awesome! Now it’s time to tweak the software to get the best performance. You can adjust the color calculation precision with a slider. The rightmost setting will be faster but less precise, potentially causing some flickering. The leftmost setting will give you the best results, but it might slow down the process, which will make the LED strips turn colors at a slower rate, or hinder other processes running on your PC.

The next option is to change the ‘refresh rate’. This setting determines how often the screen’s colour is recalculated. The higher the setting, the more frequent the recalculation, and the more precise the colours will be.

However, a higher setting will also use more processing power, which can slow down other processes running on your PC. The final option is to enable or disable ‘dynamic brightness’. This setting determines whether the LED strips will change brightness based on the average screen brightness.

If this setting is enabled, the LED strips will be brighter when the screen is brighter, and dimmer when the screen is dimmer. This setting can help to save power, as the LED strips will not be unnecessarily bright when the screen is dim. With these options tweaked to your liking, you are now ready to enjoy the full effect of your PC’s LED strips!

The colour darkness threshold option sets the minimum brightness level that a pixel must have in order to be included in the calculation of the average colour. This option is useful if the video you are watching does not fill the entire screen, as it can ignore black areas. It also lightens up the colours a bit.

However, setting the threshold too high can cause some flickering. The colour accentuation option makes the colours more distinct, and less grey and white. Setting the slider to ‘Off’ will also speed up the algorithm a bit.

If you are looking at the colors and they just seem totally off you might have to make a couple of adjustments. You can just switch the Red and Blue value checks and see if that gets the colors closer to what you are expecting.

Bitmpas can be hanlded different ways on different systems, which can cause the colors to be different. This is because they aren’t stored as BGR but rather RGB. No need to stress if it doesn’t look right , as it just requires a bit of tinkering.

The next step is calibration. With most RGB LED strips and other RGB light sources, the red, green, and blue lights do not have the same light intensity under the same currents. This means that mixed colors (such as white) will not be displayed correctly and may appear blue, for example.

If this is the case, you will need to adjust the slider for that color to reduce its domination. You may also need to calibrate if the wall you are projecting on is not completely white. A good way to calibrate Amblone is to select a static color for all channels and pick white (255, 255, 255). Then move the sliders until white light is projected on the wall.

The point of Amblone is to change the colors of your screen to match the colors of your environment. This is done by using a webcam to track the colors around you, and then changing the colors of your screen to match.

There are several different settings that you can change in Amblone. The first is the color mode. There are three different color modes: natural, vibrant, and saturated. Natural is the default setting, and it tries to match the colors of your environment as closely as possible. Vibrant mode makes the colors on your screen more vibrant, while saturated mode makes them more saturated.

The next setting is the color temperature. This setting allows you to change the overall warmth or coolness of the colors on your screen. There is also a brightness slider. With this slider, you can reduce the entire light intensity of your Amblone setup. The last things you can change are some performance settings.

First up is process priority. If you are having trouble running Amblone next to you video player or a video game, you can try changing this setting. Intuitively, one would say that setting the priority to the low side will allow other programs to run as smooth as possible. However, this does not necessarily have to be the case, so playing around with it and seeing what it does is probably best.

The “Limit loops per second” performance setting in Amblone lets you restrict how often the program can access video resources. This can help improve video playback quality if you’re experiencing issues like jitter. Keep in mind that it may take some time for Amblone to adjust to this setting.

Acknowledgement

As mentioned in the other post we want to make it clear that we did not make, or have anything to do with the Amblone LED light, its programming or anything like that. We had purchased this domain as we thought that the name was cool.

A bit after we purchased it we got an email asking for information about the product that used to be on this domain. As we looked into it we were super impressed as it is a cool product. We paraphrased the wording from the original site, as we didn’t feel it was right to copy anyone elses work.

That being said there might be some deviations as we only tried our best, so we are hoping that is good enough to help people out. If you had any part in the creation or development of the original product and want us to change or remove anything please let us know.

We just got some messages asking for info and thought that it would be beneficial to people looking for it if there was some info around that could be provided to them. We in no way are taking credit or trying to say we had anything to do with the original product, just trying to help people find some info.

And if you want to see how awesome it was, here it is in all of its glory. Again not our video but just amazing to watch. There are now products that people sell for much more , and with less functions than what Amblone offered.