wl-ambilight

An ambient light for Wayland.

For Windows 11 use tdakhran/win-ambilight.

For Linux(X11) use josh26turner/Ambilight.

Hardware

• arduino IDE compatible device
• FastLED compatible LED strip and power supply for it
• USB cable

Software

There are 2 parts:

• arduino driver - receives LED color information via USB from PC service and controls LEDs
• PC service - computes LED color information and sends it to arduino driver

How does it work?

sequenceDiagram
participant LEDStrip
participant Arduino
PCService->>Wayland: screen capture request
Wayland->>PCService: screen data
Note over PCService: Compute LED colors
PCService->>Arduino: Send LED colors over USB
Arduino->>LEDStrip: update colors over DATA PIN

Usage

Wiring

Glue LED strip (I used WS2812B 60LED/m) to the back side of the monitor. Cut and solder the parts together. I used ESP32 as an Arduino device and attached it as well to the monitor. The monitor has a built-in USB hub and ESP32 is connected to it. The power supply I use for LEDs has specs 5V 40W.

Build

Use Arduino IDE to build a driver from arduino folder. Use cmake to build PC service.

Launch

Launch ./wl-ambilight -o DP-3 -d /dev/ttyUSB2. Works on sway + arch setup.

Issues

Known

None.

Unknown

A lot. PRs are welcome.