Ambilight ESP32-S3
A camera-based bias light that watches the screen and drives the LEDs behind the TV in real time.
Purpose
Get proper bias lighting that works with any source — TV, console, projector — without a capture card or a PC in the loop. The whole thing should hide behind the screen on a single cable.
This started as a way to avoid both of the usual ambilight approaches. The longer story — sensor quirks, the decode pipeline, the boot-flash fix — lives in the posts below, which I’ll keep adding to as the build evolves.
Details
- Board
- ESP32-S3-N16R8
- Camera
- OV2640 fisheye
- LEDs
- 210 × WS2812B
- Latency
- ~38 ms
Links
Posts in this project (2)
Why I gave up on the OV2640's raw mode
Raw RGB565 looked like the fast path. Then the colors came out wrong in a way I couldn't correct, and JPEG decode won me back.
Killing the boot-time LED flash with a MOSFET
Every time the TV powered on, the strip flashed a confused rainbow for half a second. One transistor on GPIO21 fixed it.