TAPOSYNC

TapoSync reads what is on the screen and drives Tapo bulbs and light strips to match it, continuously. It is the ambient-lighting idea that ships with some televisions, applied to hardware that was never designed for it.

The interesting problem in something like this is latency. Lighting that trails the picture by a noticeable margin is worse than no lighting at all, because the eye reads the lag as a fault rather than an effect.

So the work is mostly in the sampling path: grab the frame, reduce it to a colour decision, and push it to the bulbs before the eye notices the two disagree. Everything happens on the local network — the bulbs never round-trip through a vendor cloud.