For amateur astronomy use, I needed to be able to bring down my A43's LCD brightness to a very low level. After a bit of experimenting, here is a very simple app that lets you have a darker screen than the OS normally allows:
http://code.google.com/p/superdim
It requires root.
This is my first independent Android app, so no doubt I screwed up in some way.
arpruss said:
For amateur astronomy use, I needed to be able to bring down my A43's LCD brightness to a very low level. After a bit of experimenting, here is a very simple app that lets you have a darker screen than the OS normally allows:
http://www.mediafire.com/?zwsg7aeqtcqogpm
It requires root.
This is my first independent Android app, so no doubt I screwed up in some way.
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Click to collapse
Nice, if you need it, make it. Personally, I find using Night Mode in Chainfire better than simply turning down brightness. It turns the brightness down, and renders everything in red, or whatever color you choose, but red is the correct choice to retain night sensitivity.
Obviously, I probably wouldn't watch a movie like that, but it's great for when I'm bow-fishing by full moon and want to change songs or something without wrecking my night vision.
For astronomy purposes, ChainFire3D's night mode won't be enough. At the lowest normal system backlight setting, if one is fully dark adapted under a dark sky, the amount of light leaking through the black pixels will be enormous--the screen will look grey rather than black (well, I haven't tried it, but I have experience with other devices). What one needs to do for serious night vision protection is to BOTH turn the view to red with ChainFire3D AND dim the backlight to a very low level with this app. And I am not even sure this will be fully satisfactory, because on my A43 the amount of light leakage is really big.
By the way, I posted a new version and source, and renamed the project to SuperDim. I also added a toggle for the power LED, since they made it green rather than red.
arpruss said:
For astronomy purposes, ChainFire3D's night mode won't be enough. At the lowest normal system backlight setting, if one is fully dark adapted under a dark sky, the amount of light leaking through the black pixels will be enormous--the screen will look grey rather than black (well, I haven't tried it, but I have experience with other devices). What one needs to do for serious night vision protection is to BOTH turn the view to red with ChainFire3D AND dim the backlight to a very low level with this app. And I am not even sure this will be fully satisfactory, because on my A43 the amount of light leakage is really big.
By the way, I posted a new version and source, and renamed the project to SuperDim. I also added a toggle for the power LED, since they made it green rather than red.
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Hmm. That's good to know for the A43. I'd like to know what you think of the night mode in chainfire, just because there aren't many other people who worry about this topic. I live in St. Louis, a big city, so you probably have less ambient light, but I also wonder if my A101 gets darker than the A43. Even at night, I can turn it down to the point that I really can't read a damn thing.
Great idea with the Power LED. Once again, I don't think light levels drop low enough in St. Louis for it to bother me, but I hadn't even thought of disabling it.
To really be dark adapted, you need to be away from white light for about 45 minutes. (Though I find that after 15 minutes the payoff diminishes.) It's not going to happen outdoors in a big city.
I added profiles (three night, two day), and integrated SuperDim with ChainFire3D, so if you have ChainFire3D installed, you can control its night mode directly from SuperDim, and even include its night mode setting in a profile.
For my own use, I wanted a red screen dim profile for astronomy, a green screen dim profile for reading books in the dark, a dim full color profile for other night use, a bright green profile sometimes for reading books in the day, and a full color bright profile. But you can save whatever you want in the five profile slots.
I've been using figuring out the light control stuff for SuperDim as an opportunity for learning how to program for Android in preparation for writing (not from scratch--I got a donation of the AstroTools source code under the GPL to start with, and I may port some code from open2sky and AstroInfo for PalmOS) a high-end astronomy app. (I'm an experienced PalmOS developer, but quite new to Android.) I'm actually quite pleased. I was dreading java (I've usually developed in C), but I am finding Android development, especially with Eclipse, surprisingly pleasant.
arpruss said:
To really be dark adapted, you need to be away from white light for about 45 minutes. (Though I find that after 15 minutes the payoff diminishes.) It's not going to happen outdoors in a big city.
I added profiles (three night, two day), and integrated SuperDim with ChainFire3D, so if you have ChainFire3D installed, you can control its night mode directly from SuperDim, and even include its night mode setting in a profile.
For my own use, I wanted a red screen dim profile for astronomy, a green screen dim profile for reading books in the dark, a dim full color profile for other night use, a bright green profile sometimes for reading books in the day, and a full color bright profile. But you can save whatever you want in the five profile slots.
I've been using figuring out the light control stuff for SuperDim as an opportunity for learning how to program for Android in preparation for writing (not from scratch--I got a donation of the AstroTools source code under the GPL to start with, and I may port some code from open2sky and AstroInfo for PalmOS) a high-end astronomy app. (I'm an experienced PalmOS developer, but quite new to Android.) I'm actually quite pleased. I was dreading java (I've usually developed in C), but I am finding Android development, especially with Eclipse, surprisingly pleasant.
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Click to collapse
Yeah, my point exactly. I'm about 15 miles away from the city when out on the river, but that's not really far enough to get out of the city's light pollution.
Great work integrating with Chainfire. I'll give it a try next time I'm out. It should be nice having everything in one place.
I'll be looking forward to the astronomy app. It's been a looong time since I've worked on one, but I still have the DOS version of CyberSky I helped develop, so I guess I still have a fondness for them.
I posted 0.23, fixing a bug that made day2 = day1.
And I posted 0.30, adding support for toggling keyboard and button backlight on devices that have them.
I use screen filter to make my screen dimmer..
its in the market..
1. As far as I can tell, Screen Filter doesn't adjust the backlight--it only lowers the LCD pixel intensity. As a result, even if you turn Screen Filter to something really low like 2%, if you take your device to a dark area, you'll see a grey glow coming from the screen, because the backlight leaks through the black pixels.
To remedy the grey glow issue, you need to turn the backlight down, but the OS only lets you turn it so far down (10/255 on my A43; some phones only allow 20/255) without directly writing to /sys/class/leds/lcd-backlight/brightness (which needs root, and is what SuperDim does).
I also suspect that in a dark area, with brightness set to a low value, lowering backlight will produce a more visually attractive image than Screen Filter, because lowering the backlight will make a black background be fairly black.
That's all for backlit LCD screens. OLED screens are a completely different kettle of fish, and SuperDim won't help you much there (though it'll still let you set themes controlling LEDs and ChainFire3D nightmode).
2. I generalized the code a little so it should let you control whatever LEDs your device has, as long as they have a /sys/class/leds/*/brightness interface.
3. By the way, ChainFire3D's nightmode is a touch imperfect: if you set it to red, I think it just turns off the green and blue channels. That means that green and blue visual elements cease to be visible. A somewhat better nightmode would convert the image from RGB to grayscale, and then turn off the green and blue channels. I don't know how easy to implement that would be--I don't know enough about GL blending (I tried to google but couldn't find an answer simple enough for me to understand).
arpruss said:
1. As far as I can tell, Screen Filter doesn't adjust the backlight--it only lowers the LCD pixel intensity. As a result, even if you turn Screen Filter to something really low like 2%, if you take your device to a dark area, you'll see a grey glow coming from the screen, because the backlight leaks through the black pixels.
To remedy the grey glow issue, you need to turn the backlight down, but the OS only lets you turn it so far down (10/255 on my A43; some phones only allow 20/255) without directly writing to /sys/class/leds/lcd-backlight/brightness (which needs root, and is what SuperDim does).
I also suspect that in a dark area, with brightness set to a low value, lowering backlight will produce a more visually attractive image than Screen Filter, because lowering the backlight will make a black background be fairly black.
That's all for backlit LCD screens. OLED screens are a completely different kettle of fish, and SuperDim won't help you much there (though it'll still let you set themes controlling LEDs and ChainFire3D nightmode).
2. I generalized the code a little so it should let you control whatever LEDs your device has, as long as they have a /sys/class/leds/*/brightness interface.
3. By the way, ChainFire3D's nightmode is a touch imperfect: if you set it to red, I think it just turns off the green and blue channels. That means that green and blue visual elements cease to be visible. A somewhat better nightmode would convert the image from RGB to grayscale, and then turn off the green and blue channels. I don't know how easy to implement that would be--I don't know enough about GL blending (I tried to google but couldn't find an answer simple enough for me to understand).
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I assumed it did convert to greyscale first before tinting, but you may be right. I'll have to think how to test that.
msticninja said:
I assumed it did convert to greyscale first before tinting, but you may be right. I'll have to think how to test that.
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Click to collapse
Quick test: If you set CF3D to blue, anything that's pure yellow goes black. For example, if you go to SuperDim, the left half of the brightness adjustment bar is yellow and disappears completely.
Another test: go with the browser to http://www.w3schools.com/html/html_colors.asp in red mode. Notice that the blue 0000FF and green 00FF00 samples can't be distinguished from 000000 black, while the red FF0000 can't be distinguished from white FFFFFF.
arpruss said:
Quick test: If you set CF3D to blue, anything that's pure yellow goes black. For example, if you go to SuperDim, the left half of the brightness adjustment bar is yellow and disappears completely.
Another test: go with the browser to http://www.w3schools.com/html/html_colors.asp in red mode. Notice that the blue 0000FF and green 00FF00 samples can't be distinguished from 000000 black, while the red FF0000 can't be distinguished from white FFFFFF.
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Seems like pretty clear results to me. I wonder if converting to greyscale first would even be feasible, from a coding, and from a processor cycle standpoint. It would have to use extra power, but I wonder how much. It doesn't really matter for me, everything I need to do is doable, but interesting nonetheless.
msticninja said:
Seems like pretty clear results to me. I wonder if converting to greyscale first would even be feasible, from a coding, and from a processor cycle standpoint. It would have to use extra power, but I wonder how much. It doesn't really matter for me, everything I need to do is doable, but interesting nonetheless.
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Click to collapse
There may be a way of hardware accelerating this.
Ok so I just wanted some1 to test something for me. I want to know if the yellow tint can be cancelled with a gradient overlay. So done an little app to test this.
Need some1 who has this yellow tint really bad and can see it very easily.
Again this is just a test and may amount to nothing, I need volunteers as I don't have this defect enough to see it accurately at 20% brightness.
The app is safe as there is no burn in mode yet. Just the ability to custom create a 3 point gradient from left to right with variable pixel widths for each segment.
So if anyone can test that has this really bad, that would be great.
IMPORTANT:
This little app has no burn in method yet so completely safe.
THIS IS NOT A THREAD TO ***** OR COMPLAIN AT SAMSUNG!!!
All I want to know is does this cancelling gradient help.
Start, Mid, End buttons set the settings panel to control the points (LEFT to RIGHT)
P = position
R = red
G = green
B = blue
A = alpha
So if you have a yellow tint, then you want to start with blue and alpha etc!
Updated the app to default all 3 points to 119,119,119 a 255 so the starting points are the same col as the bg
UPDATED
Not ment to be that user friendly at the moment
If it does actually do something, then I will probably have nice sliders and ability to save setting etc. Just cant be arsed doing that if it's a none starter.
Sent from my GT-I9100 using XDA Premium App
Mine has the yellow tint on the left side but I'm having trouble figuring out how to use this app. It does seem to be changing gradients.
I should have made the gradients to default to gray, will alter and put new version up later today, may do a little vid on how to use also
Sent from my GT-I9100 using XDA Premium App
updated and put in 2 lines to make it easier to show you where to look
Cool app. Seems to help if you tweak it right. What exactly does the "BURN" button do?
dinan said:
Cool app. Seems to help if you tweak it right. What exactly does the "BURN" button do?
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Well, if some1 can manage to do an inverse gradient to their yellow tint, then I would enable saving in the app, and enable burn-in, that does just that, full brightness pixel values for extended periods of time to tint the display inversely to the yellow tint, thus attempting to lessen the effect.
Ideally I want some1 with a bad example tint who also has no way to return their phone to try it
Hello, I'm looking for a way to reduce the screen brightness even more than currently possible. It is too bright for me to read at night at the moment.
Is there some way?
Check the market. There are way too many apps out there to do the task you wanted.
via xda app
I already have but none of the applications on the market allow me to make the screen really dark. It's still pretty bright even after using programs like AdjBrightness or ScreenDim.
I'm curently using Screen Filter but that only puts a grey overlay over the Displayed Applications.
Try this one: https://market.android.com/details?id=mobi.pruss.superdim
I haven't tested it though.
Please use the Q&A Forum for questions Thanks
Moving to Q&A
Already tried that, it is no darker than the lowest setting from the built in menu. Other Android devices can go much darker. I was hoping, that it is just a kernel issue or something like this.
How is it that sreec filter doesn't do exactly what you want? It gets very dark, doesn't it?
One other possibility would be to use Cyanogenmod or any other Rom that lets you set the light sensor levels manually. In my experience, this feature seems to save lots of energy. IF you manually set those levels to very dark, you may get what you are looking for ...
I really dont understand why samsung uses black backgrounds with grey text as their default and only theme.
I dont know if anyone has mentioned it. but its rediculously terrible to read text on the note when you are outside this way.
Email is by far the worst. even with all battery and background savings off and brightness set to max its almost impossible to see the dark grey email list on a black background when you are outside. New emails dont have a color but are white... so its also impossbile to see if you have new emails when you are outside.
How in the hell could samsung came up with this theme. the blue and black first of all is very ugly and its far from user friendly.
Before my note 2 i had an One X from HTC. i changed to the note because of the very good battery usage time. The One X has white backgrounds for all menus, email and sms. wich makes it perfectly readable even outside. also new emails have a blue color while readed emails are black.
I dont understand why samsung has choosen this stupid color themes for their flagships.
And yes you can invert the colors. but its insane how the rest will look if you enable the inverted colors. Its just stupid!
sygys said:
I really dont understand why samsung uses black backgrounds with grey text as their default and only theme.
I dont know if anyone has mentioned it. but its rediculously terrible to read text on the note when you are outside this way.
Email is by far the worst. even with all battery and background savings off and brightness set to max its almost impossible to see the dark grey email list on a black background when you are outside. New emails dont have a color but are white... so its also impossbile to see if you have new emails when you are outside.
How in the hell could samsung came up with this theme. the blue and black first of all is very ugly and its far from user friendly.
Before my note 2 i had an One X from HTC. i changed to the note because of the very good battery usage time. The One X has white backgrounds for all menus, email and sms. wich makes it perfectly readable even outside. also new emails have a blue color while readed emails are black.
I dont understand why samsung has choosen this stupid color themes for their flagships.
And yes you can invert the colors. but its insane how the rest will look if you enable the inverted colors. Its just stupid!
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Black colors use less battery.
It's ironic that you switched to Samsung because of the good battery time.
You really think thats ironic?
I think its ironic that HTC has removed the "screen on time" from the battery management tool as from update 4.1. because that way people cant see that their one X has a use time of less then 3 hours.
Also the Phone can heat up to about 60 degrees celcius when playing a game, in wich the screen gets so hot it starts to burn on your finger tips. battery drains from 100 to 0 in less then 30 minutes.
Well this irony is the reason i switched to the note 2. Now i get 8+ hours of use time or around 4 to 6 hours with a total of 24 hours standby.
How ironic you think it is... its allot better!
Black maybe less power consuming but the few minutes you use the email app is nothing compared to the hours you spend browsing the web with a white background. And yet i still can browse the internet for 6 hours on a charge.
So as smart as you think you are, i dont think this white background while reading a few emails will deplete your battery hours faster. But still its terrible anoying that email and sms is just unreadble outside. They should atleast add a function so people can choose for themselves wich background they prefer.
Its really not that strange i think!
Hi
In the web browser you can get black background with white text and then get incredible battery life even if you briwse a lot.
Go accessibilty option and activate the "reversed mode"
Enjoy.
Sent from my GT-N7100 using xda app-developers app
The problem isn't with black screen, but the incredibly stupid grey color fonts though. If you're rooted, obviously flash away some good roms that settles it for you. Annoying but nothing you can't get rid of.
Have you tried negative screen mode when you're out?
You could try K-9 Mail to get rid of the grey font in the Samsung Mail app.
@sygys
I didn't want to provoke you. Cool down.
As of right now, everything during my boot process has a dark theme except for a white screen that says Google and has an unlock icon at the bottom. This screen is rather blinding I darker light. Thanks to substratum, I have just about everything darkened in some fashion to not only save my eyes, but also that sweet battery life.
Isn't a significant concern, but more of a discordance in my system's general theme.
Matakor said:
As of right now, everything during my boot process has a dark theme except for a white screen that says Google and has an unlock icon at the bottom. This screen is rather blinding I darker light. Thanks to substratum, I have just about everything darkened in some fashion to not only save my eyes, but also that sweet battery life.
Isn't a significant concern, but more of a discordance in my system's general theme.
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No fix for that one at the moment! However, I would definitely agree with you on the blinding aspect. Which is why I don't look at it during a reboot!! ???
I think there was a bounty for this for someone to change it in the OG pixel thread, and the time I was there, no one was able to modify it.
Seems like this Pixel 2 is only tougher in regards to development, so I wouldn't get my hopes up :silly:
Any chance that someone has come across a solution for this since?
None have showed up yet....