Help Backlight Will Not Turn Off

[SoonerLater]

The backlight of my Droid-X will not turn off. The screen goes black in 60 seconds, as it is supposed to, but the light source around the rim of the screen is clearly lit. The four hard buttons at the bottom of the phone are not lit. This will continue indefinitely. If I press the power button once, the screen awakens. If I press the power button a second time, the screen goes black *and* the backlight turns off.

* Brightness is set to automatic;
* Screen timeout is set to 1 minute;
* My phone is rooted, but I do not have a custom ROM installed. (I only rooted to have wireless tethering).

My battery life has been horrible. I have the extended battery (BH6X), but I can go from 100% when I unplug in the morning to 60% by 9:30am with light use; 20% by noon. I've tried many battery monitoring/managing apps. I can't find the culprit, but I suspect it is the backlight staying on.

Any suggestions?

 

[VoidedSaint]

sounds like an error in your display settings, im not sure if wiping the cache will correct this, perhaps a factory data reset may help you out. i would suggest (since your rooted) download titanium backup, backup all apps/data/contacts/messages/whatever you want to backup

do a factory data reset on your phone, or SBF it back to stock, to see if the problem persists


what are you on? Froyo or Leaked GB?

 

[scary alien]

SoonerLater,

Not exactly sure which backlight you are talking about, and I say that not because you gave imprecise information, but because I find several backlight-related directories on the X whose brightness files you might be able to play with to see if this helps your issue (or at least helps you identify what might be going on).

I did a "find" for the brightness files and filtered the list by which are contained in backlight-related directories:

# busybox find / -name 'brightness' 2> /dev/null | busybox grep -i backlight

/sys/devices/platform/i2c_omap.1/i2c-1/1-0038/leds/lcd-backlight/brightness

/sys/devices/platform/ld-keyboard-backlight/leds/keyboard-backlight/brightness

/sys/devices/platform/ld-button-backlight/leds/button-backlight/brightness

So, it looks like there's one for the LCD (screen), buttons, and the keyboard. You can "adb shell" or use a terminal emulator (like Android Terminal Emulator, my personal favorite) to navigate to and play with the settings/values of the brightness file to see if that might turn things off for your.

I played with the lcd-backlight directory's brightness file like this:

$ su
# cd /sys/devices/platform/i2c_omap.1/i2c-1/1-0038/leds/lcd-backlight
# cat brightness (look at the value before changing)
78
# echo "0" > brightness (will turn screen off)
# echo "78" > brightness (will restore to previous value)

There's also a max_brightness file whose value is the usual 255 (highest brightness setting).

Anyway, I've played with the values on my Eris too and they seem to be pretty innocent and simply change the brightness of the associated function's light. I've only tweaked the brightness files, so if you stray from that, you are in uncharted waters, lol.

You might want to play-around with the above to see if there's a value that helps your situation.

If you find that there's a setting that does help you, let me know and I have an idea for something you could use to change these easier than going into your various settings, etc.

Note: while connected via USB/power-source, your screen will not auto-timeout (at least it won't for me ).

Cheers and good luck!

 

[irulz]

Thanks Mod! That was really helpful.

SoonerLater,

Not exactly sure which backlight you are talking about, and I say that not because you gave imprecise information, but because I find several backlight-related directories on the X whose brightness files you might be able to play with to see if this helps your issue (or at least helps you identify what might be going on).

I did a "find" for the brightness files and filtered the list by which are contained in backlight-related directories:

# busybox find / -name 'brightness' 2> /dev/null | busybox grep -i backlight

/sys/devices/platform/i2c_omap.1/i2c-1/1-0038/leds/lcd-backlight/brightness

/sys/devices/platform/ld-keyboard-backlight/leds/keyboard-backlight/brightness

/sys/devices/platform/ld-button-backlight/leds/button-backlight/brightness

So, it looks like there's one for the LCD (screen), buttons, and the keyboard. You can "adb shell" or use a terminal emulator (like Android Terminal Emulator, my personal favorite) to navigate to and play with the settings/values of the brightness file to see if that might turn things off for your.

I played with the lcd-backlight directory's brightness file like this:

$ su
# cd /sys/devices/platform/i2c_omap.1/i2c-1/1-0038/leds/lcd-backlight
# cat brightness (look at the value before changing)
78
# echo "0" > brightness (will turn screen off)
# echo "78" > brightness (will restore to previous value)

There's also a max_brightness file whose value is the usual 255 (highest brightness setting).

Anyway, I've played with the values on my Eris too and they seem to be pretty innocent and simply change the brightness of the associated function's light. I've only tweaked the brightness files, so if you stray from that, you are in uncharted waters, lol.

You might want to play-around with the above to see if there's a value that helps your situation.

If you find that there's a setting that does help you, let me know and I have an idea for something you could use to change these easier than going into your various settings, etc.

Note: while connected via USB/power-source, your screen will not auto-timeout (at least it won't for me ).

Cheers and good luck!