Connecting HDMI signal to raspberry pi and using it as a source for the lights behind the tv, seems to be very tricky in the beginning – in fact it is not, but it requires some additional components to be bought and installed. Unfortunately these components are not cheap… You may be lucky enough though to have scart/composite/av output in your PVR or amplituner, that provides signal in parallel with HDMI. If that’s the case, you will get what you want for very reasonable price.

No matter if you go with HDMI or RCA you will definitely need USB Video Grabber. Here is our tutorial on how to chose the grabber and how to install it on RPI.

Now, let’s start from more popular although the most expensive option, which is HDMI. If you want to use HDMI signal (from PS3, for instance), the first thing you need to do is to split the signal before it gets to TV. You can do that using HDMI splitter. Then, one output of the splitter connects to TV. The other output we will connect to the grabber, but we cannot do it directly as the cheapest grabbers cannot handle full HD resolution (are there any that can?). So, in order to pass the signal through the grabber we need HDMI to AV converter – it must have downscaler embedded to provide PAL or NTSC resolution at CVBS (RCA) output. Finally we can connect converter to a grabber. Here is how the whole set looks like:

On lighbterry.eu you will be able to buy this one soon:



If you have a device that provides signal on HDMI and SCART (or Composite) in the same time, your setup will be much simpler as you don’t need HDMI splitter and HDMI to AV converter, as these are somewhat already embedded in your device. The rest remains the same, in other words, you can connect signal from SCART (or Composite) directly to a grabber.

Simple, isn’t it? :)

Now the only thing we have left is to configure raspbian to be able to interpret the signal and control the lights.

1. Remove SPI driver from black list by adding hash # sign in the begining of the line of /etc/modprobe.d/raspi-blacklist.conf file.

#spi-bcm2708 1 #spi-bcm2708

2. In /etc/modules file add a line:

spi-bcm2708 1 spi - bcm2708

3. Here we get huge help from wonderful Hyperion team that delivered (with tiny bit of our help in testing) hyperion-v4l2. Just install hyperion the usual way, upload configuration file to /etc/hyperion.config.json and run:

sudo /opt/hyperion/bin/hyperion-v4l2 --size-decimator 8 --frame-decimator 2 --skip-reply --signal-threshold 0.08 1 sudo / opt / hyperion / bin / hyperion - v4l2 -- size - decimator 8 -- frame - decimator 2 -- skip - reply -- signal - threshold 0.08

Of course, these parameters’ values are only examples and you can adjust them to your needs. I advice you to loook at Hyperion Issue #12 to get more information about configuration and new features.

We have also prepared pre-configured system image with cec support. Just press “play” button to start ampilight – press “stop” button to switch off the effect. When power button is pressed, RPi will shut down.

System image: (torrent) pre-configured raspbian

[Update 12.04.2014] Thanks to great work of Husam Hebaishi, we prepared Raspbmc image with Fushicai grabber and hyperion installed. Here is a torrent file: raspbmc_with_fushicai_lightberry.zip.torrent

[Update 13.04.2014] I have noticed that hyperion does not work properly with the image as above. We will update the image as soon as it is fixed.

[Update 27.04.2014] Thanks to great work of Husam Hebaishi (again), we have now newest Raspbmc with Fushicai grabber support. Works flawlessly :) Here is a torrent file: raspbmc_with_fushicai_lightberryv2.zip.torrent

I hope you’ll enjoy that!