Electronics // Alan Joshy

Concept render: real build photos coming soon

Desk build 01 / 06

Desktop Ambient Light

What It Does

Samples the colour at the edges of whatever's on my monitor and throws matching light onto the wall behind it. Nothing scientific about it, it just stops the screen from being the one bright rectangle in an otherwise dark room.

Why I Built It

Started this because staring at a bright screen in a dark room for six hours straight isn't great on the eyes, and the cheap ambilight strips I looked at online were either laggy or needed their own app that phoned home to some server I didn't trust. So I built my own with an ESP32 grabbing edge colours over serial and pushing them out to an LED strip. There's a manual mode too, for when I just want a fixed colour instead of whatever's on screen.

Real-World Highlights

Keeps up fine with fast-moving scenes, the odd frame lags a beat behind, but you'd have to be looking for it.
Manual mode for a fixed colour or a couple of preset patterns, controlled from the same dashboard as the other builds.
Whole thing cost less than one of the branded kits, and I actually know how to fix it when something breaks.

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Things I've built

Colour sampling