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CM4DX Auto-brightness Settings

23702 Views 92 Replies 43 Participants Last post by  dacp283
There is lots of information on the internet about cm brightness settings, so I'm not going to go into depth on all of them. This post is about my experiences with dx specific things. (Note: Auto brightness doesn't work in the beta. I can't remember which nightly got the patch.)

First, a quick explanation of what makes the cm auto brightness special:
On the front of your dx, there is what's called an ambient light sensor. This is used to measure the light shinning on the front of your device. On stock moto, the light sensor reports an intensity and there are about 4 different brightnesses that the system chooses based on the current value.

CM is a little different. CM takes the values and averages them over a period of time. ("Window length" in settings). Why is this awesome? Have you ever been in a place where the system keeps jumping back and forth between two different brightness levels? This can be extremely annoying! Averaging the values can help deal with this. Are there any disadvantages? Unfortunately, yes. The system react more slowly to sudden changes in light. Lucky for us, Team Douche thought about this and there are things we can to fix this. Setting the "Reset threshold" will let the system react quickly to massive changes in light.

DX Specific:
If you are like me, using your stock DX in the dark is like letting loose 1000 suns directly into your eyes. Well, fear the dark no longer! CM can help. Check "Use custom." Then, set "Screen dim level" to 2. (Note: In Nightly9, a value of 1 appears to turn the backlight completely off. Not recommended.) Next, tap "Edit other levels..." Here's my settings:



Note: In the left most column, the fourth level says "50." Change this to "65" for best results.

As you can see, the lowest setting is now 2 instead of the moto stock 20. YAY! I bet you wondering, "gpaulu, why do you have two levels with the same brightness value?" Don't worry, I'll get to that. :wink2:

Unfortunately, moto kind of screwed us on brightness reporting on the low end. The lowest reported value is 10. The next one up from that is 100. This sucks for indoors because the true level in my house is around 60 or so. This means that the sensor reports 10 and the brightness level is at 2 while the lights are on. :androidsad:
I found 3 different solutions to this problem. I will tell you the first two and why they suck. Then I shall wow you with my genius!

1) Set bottom brightness level to 20 and use manual brightness widget when the lights are out. *slap* This is a writeup about AUTO BRIGHTNESS, you fool!
2) Don't check "Allow light decrease." This means that the brightness level won't decrease until you turn off the screen. Acceptable solution, but it kind of sucks.
3) Use the settings in my screen shot, then check "Allow light decrease" and set "Decrease hysteresis" to 70% or higher. (I like 90%). Now, if your sensor level ever gets above 10, the brightness will never go back down to 2 until you turn the screen off again. Notice how in my screen shot, the sensor is at 10 and the brightness level is 25. :grin3:

tl;dr;

check "Enabled"
"Reset threshold" 1000lux
check "Use Custom"
<EDIT>
"Screen dim level" 2
Select "Edit other levels" menu. Select "Set number of levels" and change it to 8.
</EDIT>
Use screen shot^. Change 50 in left column to 65.
check "Allow light decrease"
"Decrease hysteresis" 90%

Hope that helps! Let me know if you make any improvements. :android-smile:

<EDIT>
Night mode is awesome for the dark, too! Use the FX widget.
</EDIT>
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auto brightness worked...man the second i clicked it the screen went dark but its doable, hopefully this will save battery as it has been draining at the same pace no matter how little im on my phone ...question tho the brightness toggle on the power widget clicking that i noticed turned auto-brightness back off after i chose it in display settings is that something i'm not to mess with now that i've tweaked these advanced lighting settings?
jbrock98 said:
auto brightness worked...man the second i clicked it the screen went dark but its doable, hopefully this will save battery as it has been draining at the same pace no matter how little im on my phone ...question tho the brightness toggle on the power widget clicking that i noticed turned auto-brightness back off after i chose it in display settings is that something i'm not to mess with now that i've tweaked these advanced lighting settings?
If the first setting of 2 is too dim for you, you can raise it. Stock is 20 at the lowest, but I prefer 2 so that I can use it in the dark. If you really don't like having the lowest being 2, set it to higher and then when you are in the dark you can just hit the power widget to go down to 2. The power widget should cycle low->medium->high->auto. I think there are settings for it, though, so you might want to take a look at those.
G
Thanks for the settings OP. They work great, and I'm loving not burning out my eyes in the dark. At first, 2 seemed extremely dim, but I've been getting used to it.
love it thx man
BrentBlend said:
Enable and use custom both checked
window length: 30 s
reset threshold: 1000 lux
sample interval: 1 s
screen dim level: 2

Other Levels
Lower Upper Screen Buttons
0--------10---------2----- 0
11-------14--------25-----255
15-------64--------25-----255
65------100--------50-----255
101-----2999-------96-----0
3000----5999------208-----0
6000----7999------246-----0
8000----e ---------255-----0

Allow light decrease checked
Decrease hysteresis: 90%

Everything look good?
(besides the arrangement of my graph hahaha)
o and btw...ur graph alignment SUCKS!!! lol jussss playinnnn
gpaulu said:
Do you have autobrightness turned on? Try checking the regular android brightness settings.
That's what it was. I didn't realize that the CM setting didn't override the stock setting, so both were turned on.
SyNiK4L said:
o and btw...ur graph alignment SUCKS!!! lol jussss playinnnn
b-b-b-but :(
xD bahaha
The posted settings were too dark for me, so I set the screen levels at 65, 85, 100, 130, 150, 208, 246, 255, and I'm liking it so far. Thanks for the post.
I'm getting used to having 2 set especially when I was on my phone in the theater lol & looking at my screen now without my retinas burning is a huge plus....I believe it helped my battery life out significantly but I'll need full day just to verify without this post I'd never have tweaked these settings thanks a ton

"Its not who we are underneath but what we do that defines us"
This really helped a lot! I'm going to mess around with your settings, and in a few days hopefully post up some other profiles for different circumstances.
After a day of your settings, I tweaked the settings a little. I prefer as much battery savings as possible, mostly on the lower end (screen brightness on extremely low values is fairly visible even in medium-low light). Still fine tuning, when I'm done maybe I'll post what I found. Thanks for teaching me how to use that setting though. When I was playing around with CM7 for the first time I was completely overwhelmed by it.
Great post on how to do this. I tried it yesterday and some of the settings were off for me personally, but what I have found myself doing is if the screen seems to dark, or bright in a setting going in and looking at what setting that is to adjust it for my taste. I also had to add another grouping, I have 0-5 ,6-14, 15-29 and 30-64. I was finding that when the screen was at a 10 setting that it was not bright enough for me, but at a 5 setting if I upped the setting for 10 it would be too bright.

It was great to have a starting point to understand how to do this, now it can just be tweeked.
These settings are great. However, it is taking too long for the screen to brighten up when I hit the power/home button to bring up the lock screen. Is there a value I can change to make it adjust brightness faster? Thanks!
rdoane said:
These settings are great. However, it is taking too long for the screen to brighten up when I hit the power/home button to bring up the lock screen. Is there a value I can change to make it adjust brightness faster? Thanks!
It just takes a while to get it's first sample once the screen is turned on. :-\ The only solution would be to raise the brightness of the lowest level. This annoys me too. Hopefully it is something that will improve with newer versions of CM. Changing the sample interval to .5 might help a little.
These settings turned off my button lights. I changed 11 to 10 (in the first column) and it fixed the problem. Also, is there any way to edit the upper levels? My third row shows 15---64---25---255
G
supercell said:
These settings turned off my button lights. I changed 11 to 10 (in the first column) and it fixed the problem. Also, is there any way to edit the upper levels? My third row shows 15---64---25---255
After you mentioned the buttons not working, I took off my Otterbox to see if I was experiencing the same thing. They also are turned off on mine. I like them turned off though since it's a waste of battery when you have an Otterbox (rubber covers the buttons).
supercell said:
These settings turned off my button lights. I changed 11 to 10 (in the first column) and it fixed the problem. Also, is there any way to edit the upper levels? My third row shows 15---64---25---255
The right most column is for the button lights.
G
gpaulu said:
The right most column is for the button lights.
Oh, good to know! Just switched all of mine to zero to turn the button lights off completely. Thanks for the info! I should have figured since that column is labeled buttons, lol.
Am i the only one that is having force close issues? Everytime i click "Edit other levels" it tells me that Cyanogenmod settings have stopped unexpectedly. Anyone know a way around this?
Flipfreak said:
Am i the only one that is having force close issues? Everytime i click "Edit other levels" it tells me that Cyanogenmod settings have stopped unexpectedly. Anyone know a way around this?
This was a problem until nightly 4 I think. It doesn't work on the beta.
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