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Project #42 is calling me

jcdammeyer

John
Premium Member
So I was going through some plastic storage boxes and took look at the one marked Surround LED. Ah yes. I wanted to make an Ambilight TV which is made by Philips but not available in North America.
Essentially takes the colours that are around the edges of the TV image and lights up the wall behind the flat screen TV with those colours.

Now back in 2008 Elektor Magazine also had project articles on doing that. See attached PDF.
I stumbled on this interesting demo board that did most of the video processing and would require very little hardware so I bought one in 2009.
MAX9526evkit.jpg
Never did connect it to the PC (WIN-XP at the time) nor did anything else with it. Work-Work in the form of the Lions Gate Bridge Lights in the summer of 2009 and then the Olympic Ring Lights in December basically killed any personal projects for quite some time. Never did get back to it.

Sadly Windows of course has moved on. Where you could have what is a called a Vender ID and Product ID for USB devices and a simple file to instruct the system what driver to use it became an issue in later operating systems. The FTDI company that made the USB to Serial chips was still selling them but now unless you pay Microsoft the $5K or so ransom to encode your VID/PID file so the OS accepts it you are stuck with the default 0403/6001 for the serial port. And each new device adds a serial port to the list if it's configured to use what is called the VCP driver. COM1: COM2:.. COM47:
That's not a problem for the parts that I build since my user interface software let's you chose which serial port and I allow more than 4 COM ports compared to some older software.
But the user interface for the test software for the above video experimenter board hard coded the VID/PID and since the drivers for this hardware used VISTA as the last supported OS it isn't recognized in WIN-7 and up. And WIN-10 would just plain refuse it due to security concerns.

Well way back I was actually using the FTDI Vendor ID 0603 and was assigned my own Product IDs for the directional drilling tools I worked on in the 90's; PID=C652 was one of them. So I had worked out how to include these drivers in WIN-7.

The key thing is to edit a couple of the WIN-7 device driver instruction files and include lines similar to this one:
VID_0403&PID_6001.DeviceDesc="USB Serial Port".

That's the stock USB to Serial from FTDI. If you plug in a dongle and go into the device manager and look at the hardware IDs often that's what you will see.

For the Rings and earlier products using one of the FTDI devices I added this sort of information.
VID_0403&PID_C652.DeviceDesc="M9S12-USB245BM". It still uses exactly the same "Safe" driver that FTDI has registered with Microsoft under the 0403/6001 but just different USB numbers.

However, my customer's WIN-8 and up systems they could no longer use that. So I had to reprogram the FTDI devices to have the default numbers. My friend Lars at Lawicel in Sweden had to do the same thing and change his
VID_0403&PID_FFA8.DeviceDesc="Lawicel CANUSB"
to also use the 0403/6001.

The problem with that MAXIM board I bought was that the software hard coded their own VID/PID of 0B6A/434D and the device drivers that came in the zip file worked for WIN-XP and older. So I once again edited the WIN-7 device driver control files to add this (and a few similar lines in other parts of the file).
VID_0B6A&PID_434D.DeviceDesc="Maxim CMAXQUSB or CMODUSB Command Module"

Plugged the USB into the WIN-7 system and tada! The device was recognized and the software ran and talked to it.

Now. How to do this in Windows 10? Won't pay Microsoft $5k. MAXIM is now owned by a different company and the chip on the board is not recommended for new designs. Yet I want to be able to use my new Windows 10 system to work with this ... eventually ...

Well I found this web site:

An low and behold... it worked. This screen capture is from my Windows 10 system and the smaller window on the right shows the VID/PID it's talking to.
MAX9526-Win-10.jpg

Now it's an official project #42 for ambilighting around my TV that I'll finish real soon now.

I was so happy that I got it working I just had to tell someone.
 

Attachments

  • UK2008020161.pdf
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van123d

Well-Known Member
I actually followed a similar path to you except I don’t plan to finish mine. I endeavoured to create an Ambilight clone as well and bought a different but similarly capable development board. Mine was Xylinx FPGA based. I got as far as getting the HDMI pass through working before other things got in the way and that project got shelved permanently.

I looked into it again a year or so ago to see if it should be revived but saw there are commercial solutions out there now so not a lot of motivation for me to pick it back up.

In the next couple of years I figure I will buy one of the commercial solutions when we renovate the living area of the house and do some upgrades.

Good work on continuing this. I am just glad to see there was someone else crazy enough to attempt this back then.
 

jcdammeyer

John
Premium Member
You calling me crazy?o_O Me? Ask anyone...
I've actually gone further and asked Analog Devices for the source code to their windows app. Since the part is not recommended for new designs nor available anywhere. Can't hurt to ask.
It's truly a waste of time exercise to be truthful. But I did learn how to install not qualified device drivers on WIN-10 so that's a plus. And actually getting it to run on WIN-10 left me with a sh_t eating grin on my face all evening.
 

Susquatch

Ultra Member
Administrator
Moderator
Premium Member
I can feel your joy John! Well done! I like it.

Mind you, I hardly ever watch TV, but that's not the point now is it! I can imagine how the effect would appeal to the senses.
 

jcdammeyer

John
Premium Member
I can feel your joy John! Well done! I like it.

Mind you, I hardly ever watch TV, but that's not the point now is it! I can imagine how the effect would appeal to the senses.
The whole project will end up in recycling if Philips ever decides to market those TVs in Canada. Haven't seen any commercial ones that @van123d referred to. Perhaps a link or two?

The more complicated one in the magazine article still just ran a bank of R+G+B LED strips. I had in mind RGB LEDs each individually addressable over the width or height of the screen. I think that's how the Philips does it.
 

van123d

Well-Known Member
Phillips released a version themselves first. It is the Phillips Hue HDMI Sync box. You pair it with HUE LED strips or other HUE lights. This is the one I saw a year or two ago when I looked into it again.

I suspect the Ambilight patent may have expired as recently a couple of competitor solutions have been released.

One is the Govee AI sync box and the other is the Lytmi TV Backlight.

I have no experience with any of them, have not tried or seen any of them in person. To me the Lytmi looks really good and would be the one I would try if I was buying today.

https://www.lytmi.co/products/lytmi-fantasy-3-tv-backlight-kit?sscid=51k7_frce
 

jcdammeyer

John
Premium Member
Phillips released a version themselves first. It is the Phillips Hue HDMI Sync box. You pair it with HUE LED strips or other HUE lights. This is the one I saw a year or two ago when I looked into it again.

I suspect the Ambilight patent may have expired as recently a couple of competitor solutions have been released.

One is the Govee AI sync box and the other is the Lytmi TV Backlight.

I have no experience with any of them, have not tried or seen any of them in person. To me the Lytmi looks really good and would be the one I would try if I was buying today.

https://www.lytmi.co/products/lytmi-fantasy-3-tv-backlight-kit?sscid=51k7_frce
Thanks. Looking at the videos the Hue Sync Box doesn't appear to reflect the video colours near the edges as well as the Lytmi. Outside my budget range at the moment added to the fact that our audio 7.1 is provided by a Denon. Forcing the TV to be connected through the box rather than parallel suggests the video might well be delayed on the way out to the TV resulting in lip sync issues. We already see a bit of that with Netflix stuff.

Thanks for the links.
 

jcdammeyer

John
Premium Member
Just got an answer back from Analog Devices. Appears that since the device is listed as not for new designs and they don't give out that sort of software anyway that I'm hooped. I suspect the reality is the software was on some MAXIM engineer's machine and got lost in the transfer to being Analog Devices. The MAXQ2000 processor that receives the commands from the serial port is still for new designs but the reality is for a demo board often all the software is made available if someone needs it.

So this will become Project #0 and be recycled. No point in spending a lot of time on it.
 
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