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Using XBMC and the cinema-experience add-on, take your movie-watching experience to the next level by automatically setting the lights level during the different stages of the CE script run. Dim the lights when the trailers start, and turn them off completely for the feature presentation.

Components

XBMC + Cinema Experience

We need to produce events when using the playback controls (play, pause, stop) (see http://www.jordanhackworth.com/home-automation-with-xbmc/ and when moving through the stages of the CE-HA script (see http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=Add-on:Cinema_Experience#Home_Automation). This way, we produce UDP broadcasts for the events that we are interested in.

Lights controller

In my case, the lightning I will be using is a 3 meter 3528 warm white led strip (30 leds/m). The UDP broadcasts will be received by a python script (running in a raspberry pi) that will output the required light level through a GPIO pin to a circuit that will control the light intensity of the led strip.

Next Steps

• Package the RPi stuff in a Debian package
• Package the XBMC stuff in an add-on and put it in the XBMC add-on repo
• Allow to control the lights manually, independent from playback. Provide a mobile app for this.
• Detect when the movie or tv credits start so that the lights go up at that point (like in the real movie theaters!)