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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.

tray icon green license ko-fi

demo_small.mp4

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.