Notices

Hey everyone,

I'd like to introduce EBD - the Enhanced Backlight Daemon.

It monitors the N900's light sensor, and adjusts the backlight according to ambient light conditions.. a feature I was surprised to find missing on release... and again with each update.

EDIT: As others have posted, the feature does exist! Mine just wasn't working. In any case, I'll continue to improve this daemon as more customizable alternative. If nothing else, at least it's GPL, replacing the functionality in MCE.

The daemon itself is written in C and is optimized to reduce its footprint; it draws less than 1MB ram (DBUS aware), and only wakes up when the screen is on.

At the moment, there is no configuration, but I'll add that in the days/weeks to come. Note that it will fight with other LCD brightness events, so if you have a backlight control panel present, it won't work properly while EBD is running. I hope to fix this in a future release.

This is my first official package, so bear with me. I've attached the .deb, until I get set up on the Maemo repositories. It works fine for me, but remember to backup your device before installing anything from outside the stable tree!

To install it, just run (as root):

The help sheet:

Just a note - if you kill the process (/etc/init.d/ebd stop), you can relaunch it in the foreground as root. In verbose mode, it tells you a bit about what's going on.

Comments/feedback appreciated!

What am I missing? My backlight changes all the time when I switch on lights etc.
What does this do different?

im guessing your talking abt the keyboard backlight. this is for lcd back light
Edit: actually even my backlight changes based on the ambient light conditions. never noticed it a lot though. hehe

+1, my n900 already does this...but I'd love to be able to tweak it!

Can I make a suggestion to this wonderful program?

Instead of using the full brightness, may scale the minimum (current ebd default) and maximum to the maximum brightness as set in the brightness settings of the N900.

Hope you understand what I'm suggesting. Love the app...

Hmmm.. mine definitely was not adjusting to ambient light, which is why I wrote this.

For everyone whose backlight already auto-adjusts, do you know where the setting is to enable it? I can't find one anywhere and I'm running PR1.3.

Mine too... in fact I find it annoying as I frequently find myself moving my thumb over the sensor and making the display go dim while I'm still in bright light. I have to be careful how I hold the device so the display stays bright enough to be comfortable.
I even noticed it today at work when I walked from a brightly lit part of a hallway to a slightly less well lit part - and my display got considerably dimmer. I had to tilt it towards the light to get the display to brighten back up.

Don't all of 'em do this? (running 1.3 firmware)

I like that idea... I've noticed mine overreacts and over-dims when the light around it dims slightly. Being able to adjust the gamma (so to speak) would be nice.

Ok, well looks like at some point a year ago I must have disabled my auto-adjustment settings and forgot.

Well. Now I feel a little silly.

But, I suppose I can add more functionality and intelligence into ebd to make it superior to the stock auto-adjustment. Keep the suggestions coming everyone; I'll implement them as I have time.

I think I can make that work. It was my original intention but turned out to be tricky because a lot of processes adjust the brightness level on various events.

At worst, I'll implement an applet to make quick adjustments to the minimum and maximum (ie. LCD profiles).