Automatic Brightness

Hardware Librem 5
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Just want to preface this that I’m not complaining but trying to contribute to making the phone/OS better as I encounter things that maybe aren’t optimal…

While the automatic brightness does work in it’s current state, it’s abrupt and doesn’t scale smoothly so I find it distracting to use and end up reaching for the brightness control quite often to change it manually (also to conserver battery). I think what it needs is 2 things, more granularity in the level to smooth out transitions and also some hysteresis so that it doesn’t immediately react to the light level.

Are there settings somewhere that this can be tweaked on my own or is this hard coded someplace?

9 Likes
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Can anyone remind me how to turn that setting off? I enabled it when I first started playing around with the phone, but now I can’t remember how to change it.

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Settings --> Power

1 Like
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I think it needs to be improved a lot! and i have a few ideas. Use time of day to determine sun up, sun down and simply adjust brightness to say 60% on sun down, and 100% on sun up. This would be driven by the time and day and year not even the sensor. I think that could already improve the situation a lot.

If the sensor is used exclusively it should more gradually over several minutes adjust brightness not right away. Covering the sensor with your finger or putting the phone in your pocked while unlocked should not change the brightness even though sensor records no light. There would just have to be a bunch of rules and policies added including the time and date mentioned before to adjust the baseline brightness.

  1. time of day and date adjust baseline brightness
  2. ignore any input where no, or almost no light is received by sensor and use previous setting in 1, or user set setting
  3. if user changes baseline brightness use that as your starting point for adjustment instead of 1.
  4. add baseline brightness since that doesn’t seem to be implemented yet
  5. use a lot more averaging when measuring light input, and ignore outliers (shining a flashlight into phone sensor temporarily or a bright light), expect for 1, or 3.
  6. in bright sunlight ignore 2., 3., 4., 5 and adjust output more quickly to max
  7. on phone reboot and having to enter decryption password, or unlock pin ignore 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and simply use max brightness.

There seem to be ramp up and ramp down brightness requirements that need to be defined properly and ramping down brightness needs to be a lot slower than ramping up brightness in general.

Adopt code developed previously:

https://github.com/chirs241097/lightsd

https://store.kde.org/p/1259771/

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Note though that that calculation requires knowledge of latitude and longitude. So if you have your phone in lockdown mode (all kill switches in the “off” position) then there’s no GPS and hence no reliable lat/long. Sure, you could cache the last value and punt …