Friday, July 8, 2005

acdctl Controls YourApple Display Brightness

Having that software itch again I just had to get my display brightness turned down on my Apple Cinema Display. It's a wonderful piece of equipment, but it has no external controls to manipulate brightness. Just a soft-key that when touched flashes. When connected to a mac this key launches their display config tool so you can tweak the brightness, but on Windows and Linux, it does nothing.

Therefore, I wrote a little tool called acdctl which stands for Apple Cinema Display Control (or controller). It enables me to manipulate the brightness of the display via the command-line. Sure there's no fancy slider, but it's all I really need to push things down a little. I learned a bit more about programming with libusb and otherwise had a good time writing it. Even though USB is a crap protocol for bulk storage (imho), it's excellent for these sorts of light data, high diversity applications. Now that I have it, I wish I could use something like it on my CRT displays.

1 comment:

  1. acdctl 1.1 Released

    A new version of acdctl has been released which incorporates changes kindly sent in by Michael Hanselmann. The tool now directly supports one more display in the apple product line. Additionally it can now take in the vendor/product id on the comman...

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