Hi guys Couple of things, really - I was in Maplins today looking at Arduino kits/ seeing what's available and another shopper mentioned the arduino clone kits that are available online, saying the clone Uno, for example, is 100% compatible with arduino kits/gear etc.. Anyone have any experience with this stuff? If it's crap I'll steer clear, but he reckons you can't tell them apart, other than the branding. I'm a bit fuzzy on this - given the openness of the arduino type stuff, is this clone stuff legitimate or just a rip-off? Can you rip-off an open standard? Also, I have an "ambilight" LED kit behind my monitor - it's pretty good, it reduces the apparent glare of using a monitor in a small mancave under the stairs - but I remember seeing arduino mods that match the back light to the tone of what is being displayed on screen - be it desktop/film/game - and I'm assuming that having a reel of RGB LEDs and PSU/inverter means I'm halfway there, so I'm wondering what arduino (or suitable other) kit I'd need to create the reactive backlighting. Anyone?
Arduino clones are generally fine. It depends how much you want to support the company, but given that so much of it is community sourced and that there are currently two arduino companies suing each other right now... You shouldn't be able to tell them apart (apart from the looks). If anything the clones tend to be better, although go for a bigger name such as seeed. I don't have any experience with them personally, but all the hardware is open source and I see them get used fairly often. The only thing you might want to watch out for is that fake FTDI (interface chip between USB and the microcontroller) were being bricked recently, but that's been resolved (mostly) and I imagine most good clones will use the proper chip. If you're feeling adventurous you can try a breadboarded arduino (just a Atmel ATMega 328P) which you can solder together on some perfboard, although you'll want an arduino (clone) to program it anyway. I'd only bother with this if you need something a bit more compact with fewer wires going everywhere.
I plan on trying out a kit and eventually producing a more permanent solution. Thank you for the info, I appreciate it.
Also, to answer your other question, I think the clones are quite legitimate, it's just the Arduino name which they can't use. EDIT: I don't have any experience with LED strips, but as long as you can splice in some transistors in series with each colour then you should be able to control the colour using PWM easily (I don't know what PWM hardware timers the AVR's have though, but it will be easy to bit-bang). There may be a more elegant solution depending on how the colour is controlled already. It's then just a case of writing a client-side script to calculate the RGB values and sent them over serial. You may have problems making the board yourself since you'll need some sort of USB-to-serial converter, but then you could just use something like an arduino nano (or a clone) which is what I would do anyway unless I was making my own PCB.
I have no experience with Arduino clones, but I guess it should be OK. I have an Arduino Mega2560, a Teensy2.0++ (from PJRC) and an Arduino PRO micro (from Sparkfun) and all I need are the Addons files to use the Arduino IDE with Teensy and PRO micro.
I've actually been looking in to this myself, and have been slowly amassing the parts required. There are a few options in terms of video capture/hardware, but there are definitely options out there for the arduino. The LED's that you're using at the moment may be an issue. All of the stuff I've looked at so far requires individually addressable LED's, not just a strip that only does one colour. But I suppose that if you only wanted an aggregate of the whole screen then you could just treat it as one LED and set the capture area accordingly depending on how handy you are with coding etc. (which I'm not in the slightest). I was going to do something with a raspberry Pi and some other bits which allows you to pass through and analyse any HDMI signal, changing the lights accordingly.
I was looking at that very same arduino guide the other night and, yes, I'm just looking to address the strips as a single LED to produce an aggregate of the on-screen colours. As far as coding goes, I guess we'll find out, but I think there are some scripts already written for this kind of thing.
