V2X Ambilight

Lightweight Windows tray app that samples the bottom strip of your screen and drives the 7 LEDs on a Creative Sound Blaster Katana V2X in real time — no V2XBridge service, no drivers, talks directly to the device.

demo_small.mp4

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Features

• Screen capture at 20 fps with GDI (works with desktop, browser, video, borderless games)
• Adjustable strip height (3 / 5 / 10 / 15% from bottom of screen)
• Brightness and Vibrancy (saturation) controls
• Multi-monitor support
• Start with Windows (installs itself to a permanent location automatically)
• Auto-update — checks GitHub Releases on startup, one-click install
• Log window for diagnostics

Requirements

• Windows 10 / 11
• .NET 8 Runtime (x64) — prompted automatically if missing
• Creative Sound Blaster Katana V2X plugged in via USB

Download

Grab the latest V2XAmbilight.exe from Releases.

First run: Windows may show a SmartScreen warning because the exe is not yet code-signed. Click More info → Run anyway, or right-click the file → Properties → Unblock → OK.

Usage

1. Close the Creative Sound Blaster Command app before starting (it holds the COM port)
2. Run V2XAmbilight.exe
3. A tray icon appears — gray = searching, orange = connecting, green = running
4. Right-click the tray icon to adjust settings

Start with Windows

Enable Start with Windows in the tray menu. The exe is automatically copied to %LocalAppData%\V2XAmbilight\V2XAmbilight.exe and registered in the Windows startup registry. You can then delete the original exe from wherever you downloaded it.

Settings

Option	Description
Enabled	Toggle LEDs on/off
Monitor	Which screen to sample
Strip Height	How tall a strip to sample from the bottom
Brightness	Scale LED brightness (50–200%)
Vibrancy	Boost colour saturation (50–300%)
Start with Windows	Auto-start on login
Check for Updates	Manually check for a new release
Show Log	Open diagnostic log window

Building

Requires .NET 8 SDK.

.\publish.ps1
# Output: dist\V2XAmbilight.exe

Or push to GitHub — CI builds and publishes to Releases automatically.

Device Protocol

• VID: 0x041E PID: 0x3283
• COM port auto-detected via WMI (VID/PID match)
• AES-256-GCM challenge-response auth, then binary LED packets
• LED packet: 5A 3A 20 2B 00 01 01 + 7×[0xFF, B, G, R] = 35 bytes

Support

If this saved you some time and you want to buy me a coffee — ko-fi.com/chaul 🙏

License

GNU General Public License v3.0 — see LICENSE. You are free to use, modify and share this project. Any derivative work must also be open source under GPL v3.