Auto display brightness for Wear
I separated this feature from the watchface I had written for myself and made it into its own app and decided to share it for free given that the current Android Wear watches don't have an ambient light sensor.
Basically it calculates the Sunrise/Sunset times based on your location, and uses that as well as the current user activity (driving, running, bicycling, still) to automatically adjust the display brightness on the watch.
Play store: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.danvelazco.wear.displaybrightness
Posted Jul 27, 2014, 5:21 PM UTC · edited
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Wow, that is a real creative implementation. Looking forward to test it!
BTW, it just works? There is no app icon on the watch?
Thanks.
Yeah, it just works. The phone makes all the decisions and then sends the brightness level to the watch and the data listener service on the watch sets the brightness.
Thanks for the reply. Haven't seen anything happen just yet. Will pop my brightness up all the way and test, as the sun is setting in about 30/45 mins here. Hope to see some stuff changing in the next hours :)
Edit: Yup, seeing changes. I was focussing on the brightness slider in Wear Mini Launcher and didn't see any changes there. Quite weird that that one is not updating. Maybe they are not live polling the brightness setting.
Sounds good. Also, keep in mind, if a brightness level is set by the phone, and you change the brightness manually through the watch settings, that level won't be overridden automatically unless the brightness value changes from the previous value.
For example, you are indoors, and the value is set to medium, and then you change it to low, then a detection happens and determines it must be set to medium, at that point nothing will happen and it will stay on the low setting, unless the phone decides it should be low or high. Makes sense?
The idea is for the app to make decisions on it's own but also not get in the way in case you want to change things manually for whatever reason.
Yes, they are probably only showing changes when you change it there, but not based on the system settings, they would have to poll the changes periodically, and that would probably consume some battery.
Good effort, creative.
I would recommend exposing each condition to the user to allow them to set what each mode should be.
For me, the sitting still during the daytime is too bright. I would like to be able to adjust that downward.
Thanks for the feedback, I'll look into that.
Also, there may be a bit of a delay between each activity detection in order to save battery, so maybe the current brightness level is based on something you were doing a minute ago.
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