[TRACKING] "auto-brightness" aka ambient light sensor in Linux? Details?

Framework Laptop 13 Linux
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Since everyone is contributing their scripts, I’d like to share mine too! It’s actually part of my framework_toolbox, although you could separate out just the auto-brightness binary and run it on its own. I can write up instructions on how to do that if anyone’s interested.

I plan on doing a rewrite of brightnessctl so that it stops being an external dependency, but currently you still need it.

The killer feature? If you manually adjust your brightness, it will remember it!

Currently forgets after the session, and because it saves the changes for each sensor value, the brightness curves can become kinda wobbly. I also need to ignore when screen dims due to idle.

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I recall somewhere that the keyboard brightness controls interfere with the ALS, so it’s one or the other. Dunno if that’s the problem here.

Currently I have the sensor enabled, and bound GUI+F7/8 to be brightness adjustment instead.

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Hi Guys,
Glad to see the community is active in this matter!
I have been using the original script for more than 8 months now, it is great and I thank a lot the @Monster_user that took time and patience to make it.
I will surely try @Ryan_Martens’ script soon.

If I may, there is one feature that is absent from the scripts that are proposed:
The screen backlight brightness should not be set as an absolute value, is should be a value that the user can off-set using the keyboard keys.

It is a matter of practicality, if someone turn on the light behind you that is in sight with the sensor, it will take in account this light because it shines on it, where it does not always reflect the ambient light conditions.

Hence I think the final setting should be a value you can offset with the screen-brightness manual setting.
For instance, when the sensor reads a 0 value, you should be able to offset the value higher to allow for increase of screen back-light.
If memory serves me right, it was the case with Apple laptops, you were still able to change the brightness, but actually you were simply offsetting the back light.

Cheers

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Yep, that is what my tool is meant to address. What I have done is added a brightness curve, sort of like a fan curve, that will save any adjustments you make per-ambient sensor reading.

I did a rewrite of the program logic a day ago, and I will give it a separate release with binaries and instructions as soon as I can get to it.

I just need to finish a function for cleaning up the curve and making sure it goes in one direction only (so that you don’t have a curve that goes dark-bright-dark-bright), but it is currently working otherwise. I also need to have it save your preferences so that changes persist across sessions.

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Welp I’m stumped trying to find this online, but suddenly my /sys/bus/iio/ folder is now missing. For me the only thing in there was the ambient light sensor.

I know often everything in there is a symlink. Could anyone here tell me what the sensor folders beneath it point to? Or if anyone knows the hardware device name that’d help greatly in figuring out what happened.

I’m unsure what’s caused this, so any ideas there would be great too.

Thanks!

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iio:device0
points to
../../../devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:12.0/{33AECD58-B679-4E54-9BD9-A04D34F0C226}/001F:8087:0AC2.0004/HID-SENSOR-200041.3.auto/iio:device0

trigger0
points to
../../../devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:12.0/{33AECD58-B679-4E54-9BD9-A04D34F0C226}/001F:8087:0AC2.0004/HID-SENSOR-200041.3.auto/trigger0

Both of these are inside the /sys/bus/iio/devices/ folder

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Thanks so much!

I think what happened was I had an incomplete system update which was incompatible with my kernel, but this is a good reference for the future.

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GitHub - mikhail-m1/illuminanced: Ambient Light Sensor Daemon for Linux There is this tool that tries to make use of multiple datapoints of acceptable brightness to calculate something more clever than linear mapping of measured luminance to backlight brightness.

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Putting this out there for any newcomers to this thread. Op and other participants, carry on. :slight_smile:

Everyone just visiting this: 11th gen has auto-brightness working find out of the box on Fedora 37/38 and Ubuntu 22.04, and the brightness keys also work out of the box.

12th/13th gen has auto-brightness working out of the box on Fedora 37/38 and Ubuntu 22.04, but to get the brightness keys working as expected, we would ask you to utilize one of our guides for Fedora or Ubuntu.

There is a grub parameter that you would add that disables auto-brightness, while providing support for the brightness keys.

Thanks for reading.

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@Matt_Hartley is it safe to assume that a fix is being worked on to allow use of both the light sensor as well as the brightness buttons?

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For Ubuntu/Fedora/likely other distros as well, it’s either auto-brightness or the recommended parameter to get the the brightness keys working. On my Framework 13, I use the brightness keys.

Is this something that will be changed in the future? I don’t have an immediate answer for that at this time. However, the official recommendation is to simply use the brightness keys as auto-dim under Power on GNOME still works out of the box.

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So it’s an upstream Fedora issue, got it. Thanks!

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No. :slight_smile: It’s something that would be addressed at the firmware level when a solution is available. Right now, the current practice of using the appropriate parameters is what we are recommending.

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I had illuminanced configured and working nicely on my Framework which runs openSUSE Tumbleweed, but after a reboot /sys/bus/iio/drivers is now empty. I’m not sure what changed; any ideas? I don’t have hid_sensor_hub blacklisted and indeed it’s happily loaded:

# lsmod | grep sensor
hid_sensor_als         16384  0
hid_sensor_trigger     20480  1 hid_sensor_als
hid_sensor_iio_common    20480  2 hid_sensor_trigger,hid_sensor_als
hid_sensor_hub         32768  3 hid_sensor_trigger,hid_sensor_iio_common,hid_sensor_als
industrialio_triggered_buffer    12288  1 hid_sensor_trigger
industrialio          131072  6 industrialio_triggered_buffer,iio_mux,hid_sensor_trigger,kfifo_buf,iio_rescale,hid_sensor_als
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Hmmm, I have not heard of GitHub - mikhail-m1/illuminanced: Ambient Light Sensor Daemon for Linux but this looks interesting awesome. This is with testing distros listed on our Linux page, of course.

Ideally and in every instance I’ve ever used it with, auto-brightness should be a thing by default unless disabled (grub parameters or otherwise).

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Weirdly after another reboot the ALS devices reappeared and it started working again. Not sure what changed. Anyway I made some suggestions to illuminanced on GitHub and the author was nice and responsive but said he doesn’t use or really maintain it any more, so ideally I guess someone else would take it over.

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Delighted it’s resolved. Yeah, it’s a good bet on some computers, less so for ours. Glad things are working again. :slight_smile:

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This works great, thanks !
I had to set SensorToDisplayScale to 1 instead of 25, though

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Thought I would show off the new version of this script

It now can be stop, started, and kill (some what like a service), and with a easily modifiable sensor offset that can be changed while running (flags provided to the script ran separately will directly modify the offset)

Also the brightness only changes when the sensor sees a X% of change (10% by default)

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All, please remember this is a non-Framework tested/supported project - all bugs/questions best sent to their Github page. Thanks