Indigo Domotics

With the Ipad set to always on, could you do something with a heuristic image, one 1x1 pixel image (off) and one black one full screen size image (on). Then display the image based on a variable, with it set to the highest z order..

During the day the small image would be displayed giving you full access to the controls on the control page.

Set the variable to off at a certain time, and the black image is displayed, covering the controls. If the screen(black image) is touched the variable is set to off for x minutes to allow you to use the underling controls on the control page before being dimmed.

I'm not sure how bright a black image would be without testing, but have thought of implementing this a few times.

Mat - I did not exactly this for a while and it works pretty well. Since then I've modified it to pick a random photo as a screensaver. I have about 3000 photos all saved as PNGs with sequential file names. Works a treat.

mat: that's a great solution will give that solution a try!

Nine

FWIW

I bought a slack handful of the 7" Amazon Fires on Black Friday for £29.99 each.

Tweaking them to add the Play Store and the really good Indigo App for Android and I now have a series of HA controllers around the house.

I've just finished my first two Control Pages and they work great on the Fires.

How is the black level on the Fire tablets (especially the 8HD)?

I am looking to use a tablet running an alarm clock control page as a souped-up bedside clock, driven by indigo and DomoPad.

But I don't want to have that soft grey glow from a poorly "blacked" display shining in my face all night. I think I read that DomoPad can dim based on time or command, right? So I suppose if the black level is good when dimmed (as long as I can make the clock numbers readable) then that will probably work.

Thanks for the advice.

Professor Falken wrote:

How is the black level on the Fire tablets (especially the 8HD)?

I am looking to use a tablet running an alarm clock control page as a souped-up bedside clock, driven by indigo and DomoPad.

But I don't want to have that soft grey glow from a poorly "blacked" display shining in my face all night. I think I read that DomoPad can dim based on time or command, right? So I suppose if the black level is good when dimmed (as long as I can make the clock numbers readable) then that will probably work.

Thanks for the advice.

It's "not bad", it's better than the 7, which I have several of...

I have a Fire 7 as my bedside clock, and while it's much brighter than a conventional clock, it doesn't bother me. *BUT* I can sleep under pretty much any lighting condition so your mileage may vary. On the 7, it doesn't go completely black, instead keeping that grayish background, although the clock app I'm using could be responsible for some of that. In any case, the 8 is definitely better, quality-wise I'd rate it close to the discontinued Google Nexus tablets. I'll take a photo of the two together in the dark tonight and post to this thread.

Terry

Here are a couple of photos of a kindle 2015 Fire 7 and 2017 Fire 8HD in total darkness. On both tablets, the device brightness was set at 50% and the apps brightness was also set to 50%. The app is "Alarm Clock HD - Free" from Impala Studios in the Google Play store. The photos were taken with and iPhone 6+ and the brightness/contrast was adjusted slightly to best reflect what I was seeing in real life.

In the head-on view photo, there doesn't seem to be much difference between the 7 and 8HD, however in real life the 8 was slightly darker. The 7 is on the top and the 8 on the bottom.


Off-axis is where the difference in bleed-through is really apparent. Again the 7 is on the top, 8 on the bottom. The 7 does seem to have more of the supposedly sleep-harmful blue light.


As I mentioned earlier, I've been using the 7 as a bedside clock for close to two years now. I haven't had a problem with the brightness (but light-levels don't seem to bother my sleep patterns . In fact, I usually have the brightness turned up considerably more than the 50% used for the photos, just to make it more readable during the day. The 8HD should definitely be better though.

Terry

Wow, thanks, that's very helpful.

At the cost of the device, it's worth taking a flyer on it to try out. If it was a real issue, I could probably affix a tinted transparency cling to the screen.

I posted in the DomoPad thread some more specific questions about that app's functions to see if what I am thinking about doing is even really all that feasible. I'll have to see what comes back, but I am leaning towards just getting it to fiddle around with.

Thanks again for the photos/investigation.

Glad to be of help. DomoPad is fantastic, it's actually superior in every way to the official iOS Indigo Touch app. I missed your other post, but I'm sure you'll have no problems. When you install the Play Store on the Fire, don't bother with the methods that involve connecting to a PC through a USB. Simply enable developer mode, then download & install the appropriate APK files (4 of them I think) and it works just fine. I might have linked to them earlier in the thread but if not, or you run into any problems, give a shout and I'll be happy to help. The entire process takes ~5 minutes.

Terry