[alirov]

I got a secondhand amBX system (just the lights) off of Craigslist a few months ago for cheap and it's been pretty cool. The Windows drivers were a pain to deal with but I got everything up and running in Ubuntu and it works much better.

Interesting issue is that when the power is plugged in for the first time (or the power is reset), the drivers in Ubuntu don't properly link to the device. The lights just flash continuously or don't turn on at all. I have to restart into Windows with the amBX plugged in which I guess does some sort of initialization to them. From there, if I restart back into Ubuntu, everything functions normally.

No issues with burn out so far. There's something pleasing about lighting up my room at night in bright colors. And it gets even better when used as music visualizations!

[qdot76367]

Hmm, ok, I was seeing the exact same rebooting issue. Didn't realize it was an initialization issue on powerup. Just curious, what drivers/programs are you using to control it on ubuntu?

[alirov]

I haven't delved into the Windows drivers but clearly they're doing something that the Ubuntu ones aren't for this issue to exist. I just noticed it's happening after a "cold boot" of the amBX. I'm just calling it an initialization issue because that's what it seems to me. Just wanted to clear that up first just in case the way I was using "initialization" wasn't clear.

I'm using a combination of boblight, ruby-usb and combustd to get it to work. This isn't my blog but I used this as a guideline to get everything up and running:

http://slickeel.wordpress.com/2011/03/25/philips-ambx-starte...

The tricky thing was realizing I had to have it "initialize" in Windows before this would work.