Ambilight Mode
Up to date as of version 1.6
Ambilight is a feature of ArduLED, that allows you to have a strip of LEDs behind your monitor, that mimics the outer colors of your screen.
The Ambilight works in block sections around the edge of you monitor, these blocks can become visible if you press the Show/hide Blocks button. An example could be my own setup, where you can clearly see the white blocks around the edges off the screen. These are the blocks that's being assigned to a set of LEDs. ArduLED will then constantly get the dominant color in that box, and send it over to the Arduino. Be aware, don't use too many LEDs for this, because it's a lot of data to send over to the Arduino all the time, and it can easy flood it with data. The Minimum refresh rate should not be set to 0, since its also the time it takes between sending the color data between the sides. Blocks sample split is there to tell how big a mesh of samples to take from a box, ex. 25 means every 25 pixels in the X and Y direction. This option is here to make sure that we don't take too long time to calculate the combined color. Screen ID is the screen that you want to take color data from. Fade Factor is there to make a more smooth transition in colors. From here on you choose what sides you want to be included, how big the Blocks should be, the distances between then etc.
ArduLED can automatically set the hight or width of the blocks, according to the amount of LEDs pr block, and the amount of LEDs in the From to ID inputs. Just simply set the series you want, and press the autoset block sizes botton.
These are settings that can improve performance. What it does is, if the assume level is at 50%, then after it have gotten the colors of 50% of a block, it will check if the min and max color values varies more than set in the max variation. If it does not, ArduLED will just assume that the rest of the block will be the same color, and continues to the next block.
You can adjust the gamma, so that the colors will look correct. The reason why orange may not seam orange by the first look, that is just because our eyes does not see colors binary, as the LEDs display. This means that a small change in the RGB color code (ex from 0 to 5) will look like a big change, however a change from the top of the RGB values (ex 250 to 255) can be very hard to see.
You can adjust the gamma, so that the colors will look correct. The reason why orange may not seam orange by the first look, that is just because our eyes does not see colors binary, as the LEDs display. This means that a small change in the RGB color code (ex from 0 to 5) will look like a big change, however a change from the top of the RGB values (ex 250 to 255) can be very hard to see.
The colors will generally look good at a gamma value around 2, however it may differ from LED to LED.