Alexander Riccio

A quick hack!

Yesterday I threw together a quick implementation of the DDC/CI vs sunlight idea that I described the other day.This isn’t a full implementation – it is not aware of the monitor’s brightness is, save for the time after execution of its own commands – but I will attack this project methodically &  iteratively. After all, I’m learning a ton about C++ & C#!

The code!!! (zip archive)

Overview of the code (high-level):

Keep in mind that it’s a hack, and this was the first time I have written in C# 🙂

There is some code that should be ignored, DllImport for example, that has no functional role.

The main method does only one thing, mapLight() – I purposefully abstracted as much as possible.

mapLight() very roughly maps hourly solar intensity (~0-600) over the range of possible brightnesses (0-100). Then, setBright() runs a commandline program – ScreenBright – to actually set the screen’s brightness.

A closer look at the code:

The lazy way of mapping hours -> brightness that I used is simply a hardcoded, 24 long int[] array “Light”, followed by an ugly switch/case structure to call setBright() with the array Light indexed by the hour of the day, as retrieved earlier with DateTime.Now.Hour .

setBright() then compares both parameters, and calls dimm() or light() appropriately.

Then,  dimm() or light() will run “ScreenBright.exe – set brightness” in a command window, to incrementally change the screen’s brightness to the desired value.

Raw code:

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Runtime;
using System.Runtime.InteropServices;
using System.Text;
using System.Threading.Tasks;
using System.Windows;

namespace dimming
    {
    using System.Threading;
    public class dimming
        {
        public static void Main(){mapLight();}
        private static void mapLight() {
        int hour = DateTime.Now.Hour;
        System.Console.WriteLine("hour is: " + hour);
        Thread.Sleep(500);
        int[] Light = new int[] { 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 10, 15, 30, 60, 85, 95, 100, 100, 100, 95, 85, 60, 25, 15, 10, 0, 0, 0 };
        switch (hour){
            case 0://0 of 600
                setBright(0, Light[hour]);
                break;
            #region ugly switch/case construct
            case 1://0 of 600
                setBright(Light[(hour - 1)], Light[hour]);
                break;
            case 2://0 of 600
                setBright(Light[(hour - 1)], Light[hour]);
                break;
            case 3://0 of 600
                setBright(Light[(hour - 1)], Light[hour]);
                break;
            case 4://0 of 600
                setBright(Light[(hour - 1)], Light[hour]);
                break;
            case 5://0 of 600
                setBright(Light[(hour - 1)], Light[hour]);
                break;
            case 6://50 of 600
                setBright(Light[(hour - 1)], Light[hour]);
                break;
            case 7://100 of 600 W/m^2
                setBright(Light[(hour - 1)], Light[hour]);
                break;
            case 8://200 of 600
                setBright(Light[(hour - 1)], Light[hour]);
                break;
            case 9://400 of 600
                setBright(Light[(hour - 1)], Light[hour]);
                break;
            case 10://500 of 600
                setBright(Light[(hour - 1)], Light[hour]);
                break;
            case 11://550 of 600
                setBright(Light[(hour - 1)], Light[hour]);
                break;
            case 12://600 of 600
                setBright(Light[(hour - 1)], Light[hour]);
                break;
            case 13://600 of 600
                setBright(Light[(hour - 1)], Light[hour]);
                break;
            case 14://600 of 600
                setBright(Light[(hour - 1)], Light[hour]);
                break;
            case 15://550 of 600
                setBright(Light[(hour - 1)], Light[hour]);
                break;
            case 16://500 of 600
                setBright(Light[(hour - 1)], Light[hour]);
                break;
            case 17://400 of 600
                setBright(Light[(hour - 1)], Light[hour]);
                break;
            case 18://300 of 600
                setBright(Light[(hour - 1)], Light[hour]);
                break;
            case 19://200 of 600
                setBright(Light[(hour - 1)], Light[hour]);
                break;
            case 20://100 of 600
                setBright(Light[(hour - 1)], Light[hour]);
                break;
            case 21://0 of 600
                setBright(Light[(hour - 1)], Light[hour]);
                break;
            case 22://0 of 600
                setBright(Light[(hour - 1)], Light[hour]);
                break;
            case 23://0 of 600
                setBright(Light[(hour - 1)], Light[hour]);
                break;
            #endregion
            default:
                System.Console.WriteLine("Time out of range!??! What the hell!" + hour);
                break;
            }
            }
        #region low-level handling (setBright, dimm, light, getnowBright)
        private static void setBright(int startat, int endat){
                if (startat > endat) { dimm(startat, endat); }
                else if (endat < startat) { light(startat, endat); }                 
                else if (endat == startat) { System.Console.WriteLine("startat=endat"); 
                Thread.Sleep(5000); }                 
                else { System.Console.WriteLine("What the hell?!?!?! startat ? endat neither greater nor less nor equal thereto!"); }                                                                                 
                Thread.Sleep(500);}         
        private static void dimm(int startat, int endat){
                System.Console.WriteLine("startat > endat");
                Thread.Sleep(500);
                for (int i = startat; i > (endat); i -= 10)
                {
                    string sb = "-set brightness " + i.ToString();
                    System.Diagnostics.Process.Start(@"C:\Users\Alexander Riccio\Downloads\ScreenBright\ScreenBright.exe", sb);
                    System.Console.WriteLine("Dimming to: " + sb);
                    Thread.Sleep(5000);
                }
            }
        private static void light(int startat, int endat){
            System.Console.WriteLine("startat < endat");
            Thread.Sleep(500);
                for (int i = startat; i < (endat+1); i += 10)
                {
                    string sb = "-set brightness " + i.ToString();
                    System.Diagnostics.Process.Start(@"C:\Users\Alexander Riccio\Downloads\ScreenBright\ScreenBright.exe", sb);
                    System.Console.WriteLine("Increasing Brightness to: " + sb);
                    Thread.Sleep(5000);
                }
            }
        #endregion
        }//class bracket
    }//namespace

Moving forward:

At the low level: It looks like I will have to port this to unmanaged C++ code,  which seems like the only easy way to interface with the windows APIs. It seems P/Invoke could allow me to work in C#, but I simply don’t know enough about it. Then I can implement the SetMonitorBrightness function — and I’ll be 90% done.

~ by Alexander Riccio on February 13, 2013.

Posted in Electronics, Engineering, Featured Posts, Generally applicable to life, Projects, Uncategorized
Tags: C#, Circadian, Circadian Rhythms, Data Display Channel, Data Display Channel/Command Interface, DDC, DDC/CI, Win32, WinRT