Disable the ambient light sensor

(Re-enabling the ALS)
m (Disable The Ambient Light Sensor moved to Disable the ambient light sensor: sentence capitalization for page titles)

Revision as of 11:00, 22 February 2011

The N900 contains a Taos TSL2563[1] Ambient Light Sensor (ALS). This light sensor is used to auto-adjust the screen brightness relative to your preferred brightness setting. Some users may find this auto-adjusting to be annoying, when the screen dims every time you hold your finger over the screen, or trying to use the phone outdoors.

Contents

Prerequisites

You will need to install the rootsh package.

Disabling the ALS

TMO user dr_frost_dk discovered[2] a simple way to disable the ALS:

sudo gainroot
sed -ie 's/brightness-als/brightness-simple/' /etc/mce/mce.ini
killall mce

No reboot is required for the new setting to take effect.

Please note that the actual ALS device is not disabled; it still functions and can be used by other applications. This setting only disables its influence on the screen's backlight.

Re-enabling the ALS

If you want to change back to the original setting:

sudo gainroot
sed -ie 's/brightness-simple/brightness-als/' /etc/mce/mce.ini
killall mce

No reboot is required for the new setting to take effect.

The backlight will once again be influenced by the ALS.

References

  1. http://natisbad.org/N900/n900-commented-hardware-specs.html
  2. http://talk.maemo.org/showpost.php?p=947958&postcount=97