Colour me excited. This homebrew lighting project lets you imbue your boring, lifeless gaming monitor with the magic of your very own makeshift Philips Ambilight feature. And while it may not have all the titillating features of the Philips Momentum on our best 4K monitors guide, it’ll tide you over while you save up.
It may be devoid of the Momentum’s 120Hz refresh rate and 4ms response time, but this project (via Sweclockers) will provide a remarkably gaudy, somewhat spectral experience as you wander through the vast expanses of your favourite game worlds.
Built around an Arduino Uno, and connected to a flexible Yunbo RGB LED strip that skirts the screen back, the project is not standalone. The connected PC utilises Prismatic software to read the colours shown on screen, which it sends through the Ardunio before each corresponding LED is assigned a colour.
Sounds easy enough right?
Of course, it’s a little more complicated than that. Accurate voltage calculations are necessary to ensure you don’t blow anything up, and I expect there’s a fair amount of soldering involved. Even attaching the lightstrip to the back of the TV with double sided tape looks fiddly as heck, but if you’re feeling handy and want to get totally immersed in your game worlds, this will be the project for you.
There are other solutions if you want to turn your monitor into a lightshow, but this is the brightest one we’ve come across recently, and from the video above looks more responsive than NZXT’s lighting kit.
In fact, this thing is so darn bright I’m convinced it could turn even the gloomy vistas of Metro Exodus into a freaking carnival.