Use Raspberry Pi to Bring Reactive RGB Lighting to Your TV

RGB lighting has made a name for itself in the computing space, especially when it comes to gaming. But what if you could bring the trend from your gaming den to the living room? With this project shared on Reddit this week by a maker known as Moe7863, you can bring RGB to your TV with a Raspberry Pi. 

The setup relies on a Raspberry Pi 4 to control 116 individually addressable LEDs. It also uses a USB camera to detect the current image and assign a color for each LED based on its location along the edge of the screen.

It doesn't take much hardware to recreate the project. In addition to the Pi 4, you'll need an Arduino Uno R3, LED strip, USB camera and a power supply. You don't even need an expensive LED strip, Moe7863 had no trouble using a generic LED strip from Amazon.

Moe7863 mounted the USB camera to the wall across the room. It required a 10m (32.8 feet) USB extension cable to reach the Raspberry Pi. There is a slight 50-100ms delay, as input information has to travel from the camera, through the Pi and to the Arduino before reaching the LED strip.

This is still a work in progress with plans for improvement. If you'd like to check this project and more of Moe7863's work, you can follow him on Reddit. 

This might not be the first ambient lighting project for the Raspberry Pi, but we appreciate Moe7863 for bringing it to the Pi 4 and showing that you don't need expensive hardware to build awesome projects at home.