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Help cant set brightness to max

R

redthunder1706

Lurker
Hey Droid users.

The other day i was fiddling with my brightness setting using the Android power controlling widget, then suddenly the third brightness setting (the max brightness one) was no longer anywhere near as bright as before.
I went into display settings and turned brightness to max there but it was still not at max, closer to around 50% I'd say.
Have tried disabling the widget, rebooting, and even comparing my phone to another identical HTC desire using the same wall paper and the difference was obvious.

Any suggestions?
 
You could have a look and see if something has changed your max brightness.
You'll need a terminal emulator from the market, then type:
Code: 
cd /sys/devices/platform/amoled-backlight.0/leds/lcd-backlight
Code: 
cat max_brightness
It should return 255. If it's less than this, something has messed with it.
If it is 255, then that's OK. Now you can set the backlight to max and see if it looks bright enough.
Code: 
 echo 255>brightness
If it looks brighter than you can usually set it, then perhaps something is messing with it, not sure where to go from there.
If the max_brightness is less than 255, then that's probably your problem.
Edit: Just tried changing this value myself using temproot, but my terminal emulator doesn't seem to be root-aware, as it doesn't get su access. I've not had much experience with root on this phone, but I'm sure there are plenty of people around here who can tell you how to do this should you need to.

Edit 2: BTW, My phone is an amoled, if you have SLCD, the above file structure might be different.
 
Don't have any experience with Linux but had a go with what you suggested. Didn't have any luck though, here's what was returned:

export PATH=/data/local/bin:$PATH
$ $cd /sys/devices/platform/amoled-backlight.0/leds/lcd-backlight
cd: can't cd to /sys/devices/platform/amoled-backlight.0/leds/lcd-backlight
$
$
$
$cat max_brightness
max_brightness: No such file or directory
$
$
$
$ echo 255>brightness
cannot create brightness: read-only file system
$
 
redthunder1706 said:
Don't have any experience with Linux but had a go with what you suggested. Didn't have any luck though, here's what was returned:

export PATH=/data/local/bin:$PATH
$ $cd /sys/devices/platform/amoled-backlight.0/leds/lcd-backlight
cd: can't cd to /sys/devices/platform/amoled-backlight.0/leds/lcd-backlight
Click to expand...

As I said, if you have a different screen, (and thinking about it, just a different version of Android) then the path maybe different. I have an AMOLED screen, but the path here clearly refers to an CLD-backlight. This indicates that this release (I'm on 2.2) was witten after the switch to SLCD. If you're on 2.1, then I expect it will be different.

You can use one of the file managers on the market to check it out. I use ES File Explorer.

If you fire this up, you shoul dsee it is pointing to your sdcard "/sdcard/"
tap the sdcard icon on the bar below, and the path displayed above should change to "/" meaning the root directory of your phone. (The card icon should change to a house as well).

open /sys, then /sys/devices etc, following the path I gave until you get to a level that doesn't exist and have a look around. You should find something that relates to screen brightness. If you follow that then somewhere in that folder (and possibly a subfolder or two down), you should find some files called brightness and max_brightness.

Unfortunately ES won't let me directly write to the brightness file, that's why I used a terminal emulator. Now you have the correct path, you can try it again, and see what happens.

If that all seems too much of a faff, then probably best try a factory reset.
 
In that case, next steps are a factory reset, and if that doesn't fix it, a warranty repair. Although, it might be a tricky one to convince them there's a fault.
 
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