Screen never turns off

Nillaz wrote:

David Li wrote:

Nillaz wrote:

I tried this as well with the same result. The adaptive brightness toggle in the display settings is probably a dead end as I don't think the remote has the hardware necessary to leverage it.

There is some control over screen brightness from the smartremote.apk.  But the limitation is we can't turn the screen OFF.  This seems to be a limitation of the AndroidOS.
I don't remember if the screen display brightness is currently exposed as a myServer command...probably something that can be added if not.  But it won't turn the screen Off, even if a zero value is sent to it (unfortunately).

I have just gotten in the habit of turning the remote onto it's face during critical movie watching

 

Understood. I'm aware that this is a longstanding android issue. The problem is that the screen isn't dimming down either, or at least not consistently.

I opened a second one of my remotes and connected it a little while ago so I could compare the behavior between the two of them. The first remote has only ever dimmed down once about a half hour ago. I picked it up and it brightened up and then after I set it down again it hasn't dimmed back down. The second remote dimmed/brightened as expected a few times when I first connected it to the server but is now acting like the other remote. I've been monitoring it for the last 10 minutes or so and it is still at 100% brightness while just sitting on as table.

You might find that the motion sensor within the SmartRemote is REALLY sensitive.  Any vibration will make it think it's being moved and wakes it up.  That is what I have found when I assumed it should be dim (asleep) but found it to be bright (in use).

OK, but then the question becomes what can be done about it? The remotes are sitting on a table in the basement. That table is on a concrete slab and I'm not even in the same room with it. If it's really that sensitive that's not really useful in practice.

The remote can't stay permanently at 100% brightness. The second remote has been out of the package only for about an hour and has already chewed through a quarter of the battery and it's not even being used. And even if it was viable laying the remote facedown isn't ideal either. We have no screen protectors yet and I'm really not too keen on risking scratching the screens on expensive remotes.

I just checked on them again. One of them dimmed down at some point and the other one is still at 100%. These remotes are sitting right next to each other.

Nillaz wrote:

OK, but then the question becomes what can be done about it? The remotes are sitting on a table in the basement. That table is on a concrete slab and I'm not even in the same room with it. If it's really that sensitive that's not really useful in practice.

The remote can't stay permanently at 100% brightness. The second remote has been out of the package only for about an hour and has already chewed through a quarter of the battery and it's not even being used. And even if it was viable laying the remote facedown isn't ideal either. We have no screen protectors yet and I'm really not too keen on risking scratching the screens on expensive remotes.

I just checked on them again. One of them dimmed down at some point and the other one is still at 100%. These remotes are sitting right next to each other.

The good news is the screen protectors (glass) are on their way here.  couple of weeks out.  In the meantime, put a glass cleaner cloth down and lay the remote ontop.  I am much less careful and so far, zero scratches.

We can revisit the screen timeout and the motion sensor sensitivity.
There are no differences (unless you changed settings) between the two remotes with regards to sensitivity.
An hour for 25%?  that sounds like way too much.  Maybe that battery was not thoroughly charged.

The remote I've been working with for the last few days was on the charger all night. I just checked the battery statistics and it's been almost 3 hours since the last full charge. It's currently at 52%.

At that rate of power consumption I'm not sure the battery would even make it through a typical evening, much less a day.

Can you point me to somewhere that it's discussed. Because if I download other apps on the remote those all seem to work with the screen timeout. It's just the smartremote apk that seems to block it. Sorry to keep pushing on this but I'm thinking it might be some setting in your android app. I know I've heard about not being able to set the screen to off from an app directly but I've not heard of apps causing the display inactivity timer to not fire. Unless of course they've specifically written their app to do so.

Is there a software solution to this yet?  My screen will also stay on all the time and the battery drain is pretty severe.  I can push the on/off button to turn it off, but I would simply like it to dim after a defined period of time of no use.