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Bright breath

A project log for RemuterMCS

Remote control for muting and unmuting the microphone, camera, and speakers

wjcarpenterWJCarpenter 03/26/2021 at 03:530 Comments

For the M5StickC, the brightness of the TFT display is not controlled the way you might expect, with a PWM operation on a GPIO pin from the ESP32 processor. Instead, the backlight is wired to an output pin of the AXP192 power controller. The voltage supplied by that pin can be programmed to provide 1.8v to 3.3v in 0.1v increments.

M5's Arduino IDE library for the M5StickC provides an AXP192 method called ScreenBreath(). I don't know why it's called that, but what is does is set a value to control the output voltage from that pin on the AXP192. That saves you a small amount of trouble in doing it yourself over the I2C interface. Interestingly, even though the AXP192 would accept values 0 - 15, the M5 API limits the upper range to 12. (I suspect that's based on how much voltage the TFT backlight LED would tolerate. The M5StickC product page says "2.8v max200ma". The AXP192 default output voltage is 2.8v. Maybe not worth sacrificing a device to find out what happens when you overdrive the backlight LED. :-) )

I did some experiments, and the display is completely dark with any value of 7 or below (at least for my eyes with the M5StickC that I'm testing).

So, realistically, the usable values are 8, 9, 10, 11, 12. 

I provide a configuration item for setting the display brightness in my sketch. I don't limit it at either end, but the above limits are still there.

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