Hyperion – Another Ambilight clone

Hypercon – Hyperion config tool

Hyperion is another Ambilight clone for the Raspberry Pi.
It essentially works in the same way as the boblight-dispmanx solution in that it uses dispmanx to capture the screen contents, which are then converted to colours and pushed to your LEDs.

The real advantage of Hyperion is it’s very low CPU usage, typically less than 2% for 50 LEDs.
So this really helps you to squeeze the most performance out of your Raspberry Pi. e.g playing a 1080p bluray rip with DTS audio while running LEDs is totally possible – with CPU to spare!

There are many nifty features like black border detection which works with letterbox and 4:3 videos, an Android app to set static colours and a really cool config tool, Hypercon, to help you configure your LEDs. In the above image the ‘light’ is generated dynamically depending on image you choose to display on the ‘TV’. Try it, its really cool.

It supports WS2801, LDP6803, LPD8806, Adalight, and Sedu based LEDs and can even act as a boblight server. So if you have other boblight devices on your network (e.g a cable/satellite TV box) they will still work with your Pi running Hyperion.

I’ve been running this now for a month or so and I really like it.

It’s easy to install, just download an installation script and run. Then create your config file – in much the same way you do with boblight. If you are switching from boblight, simply disable boblight from Raspbmc settings and install Hyperion – no changes to the hardware setup are required.

For more info and installation instructions head over to their github page here:
https://github.com/tvdzwan/hyperion/wiki

Many thanks to the developers poljvd and tvdzwan, they have done a really great job and continue to add new features and fixes at a very impressive rate! You can contact those guys and suggest features over at the Raspbmc forum: http://forum.stmlabs.com/showthread.php?tid=11053