Possible solution for lack of notification light, developers needed

[Guest woutf]

I very much enjoy my Galaxy S, but I do think Samsung made a pretty big mistake by not including a notification light for missed calls/texts/emails. Luckily, there might be a way around this. The capacitive buttons both have a backlight, which must be controllable somehow. We could use those as notification lights by either turning them on, or letting them blink.

Over at xda, there's already a thread on this, but people are running into some problems. I made this thread to bring it to the attentions of developers here, and maybe they could help out.

Most of the work has actually already been done. There's a program called LedEffects which keeps tracks of notifications and can blink a led. There's also a program for the Samsung Moment which tries to use the capacitive buttons as indicators. If someone could merge these programs, and add some Galaxy S-specific code for controlling the backlight of the buttons, we'd be done!

I'm not a developer, so I can't help technically, but I really hope there's someone here at modaco who is willing to give this a shot.

Edited July 5, 2010 by woutf

[Guest woutf]

The problem seems to be with file access. Over at xda, someone has already found out which files are used to enable/disable the backlight, but for some reason they're locked, even with root access.

Does anyone know how to fix this?

http://forum.xda-developers.com/showpost.p...mp;postcount=59

$ su

su

# cd /sys/devices/virtual/misc/melfas_touchkey

cd /sys/devices/virtual/misc/melfas_touchkey

# ls -l

ls -l

-rw-r--r-- root	 root		 4096 2010-06-27 04:41 uevent

-r--r--r-- root	 root		 4096 2010-06-27 04:41 dev

lrwxrwxrwx root	 root			  2010-06-27 04:41 subsystem -> ../../../../class/misc

drwxr-xr-x root	 root			  2010-06-27 04:41 power

-rw-r--rwx root	 root		 4096 2010-06-27 04:41 touch_version

-rw-r--rwx root	 root		 4096 2010-06-27 04:41 touch_update

-rw-r--rwx root	 root		 4096 2010-06-27 04:11 brightness

-rw-r--rwx root	 root		 4096 2010-06-27 04:41 enable_disable

# cat brightness

cat brightness

brightness: invalid length

# cat enable_disable

cat enable_disable

enable_disable: invalid length

# hexdump brightness

hexdump brightness

hexdump: brightness: Input/output error

# hexdump enable_disable

hexdump enable_disable

hexdump: enable_disable: Input/output error

#

[Guest kanzlr]

why do you think that the light must be controllable by software?

it is very likely that this is hard wired in terms of hardware, so that they light up when they send a "button pressed" signal.

[Guest KLoNe Technologies]

why do you think that the light must be controllable by software?

it is very likely that this is hard wired in terms of hardware, so that they light up when they send a "button pressed" signal.

Very interested in this topic.

[Guest n4nick]

why do you think that the light must be controllable by software?

it is very likely that this is hard wired in terms of hardware, so that they light up when they send a "button pressed" signal.

Well they are 'soft' buttons so unlikely to be hardwired. Pretty sure the buttons (and lights) are unresponsive when the handset is suffering from a lag for example, which suggests software control.

Personally I use the 'Flash Notify' app on the Market. Flashes the screen instead. Quite configurable.

[Guest woutf]

Well they are 'soft' buttons so unlikely to be hardwired. Pretty sure the buttons (and lights) are unresponsive when the handset is suffering from a lag for example, which suggests software control.

Personally I use the 'Flash Notify' app on the Market. Flashes the screen instead. Quite configurable.

Exactly. And if we could just make those two files (brightness and enable_disable) accessible, we would be able to test it. Anyone here with Android filesystem knowledge who can help out?

[Guest woutf]

Exactly. And if we could just make those two files (brightness and enable_disable) accessible, we would be able to test it. Anyone here with Android filesystem knowledge who can help out?

I'm giving this thread a little bump. There must be some Linux-savvy people here who can figure out how to access these files, right? If they turn out to control the backlight, then making a small program that uses them for notifications should be rather easy.