From the last years, I started to gain interest in another new hobby: dancing. Naturally, I would like to practice at home. The ideal environment would be a large empty room with a full size mirror on the wall, but I live in Paris so the rent is very expensive and thus I do not have this kind of space, actually I do not even have any free wall without any furniture where I could place a mirror.
On march 2023, Valve announced with a youtube video: Counter-Strike 2, the sequel to Counter-Strike: Global Offensive on a new engine: Source 2. The game was scheduled for global release at “summer 2023” and available as a beta program to a few selected players.
Unfortunately, I was not granted access to the beta, but it didn’t take long for the beta files to be leaked as a torrent.
Ambilight is a technology of Bias lighting used in Phillips TVs which illumitates the back of your tv with colors related to the image displayed. Their solution is expensive, but you can create your own solution using an ESP 8266 controller and some cheap led strips.
In order to adapt the lights to the image, the ambilight system needs to capture the images displayed on your tv. There are 2 main ways to do that: you can use a physical box to capture the video using an HDMI splitter and an acquisition card between your devices (Mi Box, Nvidia Shield, Xbox …) and your TV or you can use a software solution to directly stream the video from a device (PC, Android TV …).
A few months ago, I started to search for some upscaling software to integrate into Zogwine, my media center with the goal of upscaling some of my old animes either on the fly or via some kind of preprocessing. I found quite a lot of projects on github, and especially the Video2X project which gathered many different projects and versions. So I decided to do a quick benchmark to decide which one to use. I would also recommend you to read this excellent article from crunchyroll’s tech blog where they did their own tests for upscaling.
When I started to tinker with home automation and electronics a few years ago, it was common to use arduino cards to create DIY connected devices. You would then communicate with a central server to send and receive information. The communications were usually done using usb, ethernet (using an ethernet shield) or radio (2.4Ghz or 433Mhz) with projects like MySensors.
Most of the time these cards were programmed using the “Arduino language” which is quite close to C++. I kept this habit when I switched to use the esp8266/esp32 cards but in the meantime, awesome projects were developped to facilitate the development of this kind of devices, especially dedicated ecosystems like ESP-Easy, Tasmota and ESP Home, which is the project that I decided to use.
I was always interested in going furether than the pre-made RGB equipement by various manufacturers because each system was only compatible with only one brand (ex: iCUE, RGB Fusion, Asus RGB …) and that their RGB softwares were very unfinished and didn’t exploit the full potential of the RGB hardware.
So, when I built my first desktop PC, I decided to create from scratch a custom RGB system. This was based on an arduino board, internally connected to my PC using USB. This arduino was controlling cheap adressable RGB strips (WS2812B) powered by my PSU in 5v. On the software side, I developped a custom C# application, LedControl. This was my first attempt at controlling my RGB leds.