Feature Request: Allow LED brightness to be controlled while riding

[gregoryking]

Apps like Float Control provide UI controls to adjust LED brightness levels while riding. This can be useful when using brighter main beams to quickly change brightness while riding to avoid dazzling others when full brightness is not required. This was apparently possible in float package (and why these UI controls exist), but is no longer possible with Refloat since it lacks the necessary infrastructure (source @surfdado).

This feature request is to implement that adjustability while riding.

[lukash]

I'm not against this, although I'm not very fond of this approach myself. I may even add it at some point but I'm swamped with other WIP things right now. Contribution welcome if implemented cleanly.

There are however conceptual details that make this a bit complicated. In Refloat the front and rear strip each have two brightnesses, one for headlights mode and one for idle/normal lights. The headlights mode is active when headlights are turned on (in AppUI or via a footpad konami sequence, not sure 3rd party apps have the toggle) and the board is engaged. (And the need to have separate brightness for front and rear is I think obvious, you may have different LEDs that need a different level.)

Not sure anymore how Float did this, but I think it was simpler and just had those brightness sliders, which didn't map well on this concept. And I really do want the two modes (headlights/normal) with pre-configured brightnesses, I don't wanna be fiddling with a slider myself, at least not under normal circumstances.

So, to preserve a clean concept, how to make custom brightness sliders work on top of this? IMO:

• The sliders should work as temporary override of the configured brightnesses (and not be stored in the config themselves).
• Since the headlights and normal modes each have separate brightness for front and rear, but it'd be too much for the user to slide front and rear separately, the brightness should be a modifier coefficient applied both to front and rear.

So, leaving status bar out of the picture for now, there should be two sliders, for headlights and for normal mode, each applying to both front and rear. Note you will have to know which mode you are on at the moment if you want to adjust the current brightness while riding (this can be handled in the whichever App UI).

Since the sliders are modifier coefficients they need to start at 1, but you'd expect to be able to increase the brightness as well, so they need to go up too, but how far up should they go? Is 2x more brightness enough for them or should they go higher? Seems 2x could be enough, but it does mean if you set your default below 50% you won't be able to slide to full brightness. Note this way the slider may not look the way most people would expect - it will always be a slider between 0 .. 2 with current value starting at 1, while people would expect to slide from 0 to 100%.

Now what about status bar? I'm not sure it also needs a slider, but note the status bar also has two brightnesses for headlights and normal mode. The idea here is you set the headlights mode brigness low because you expect to be turning headlights on when it's dark and then you want it low to not be blinding. OTOH in normal mode it's probably daylight so you want it brighter. So this complicates quite a bit again. If the status bar really needs an override slider, there should only be one to keep the UI sane, and the only sensible way I see for this is to apply the slider as a modifier to both the headlights and normal brightnesses. Not sure it fits the requirements here as I don't really know them.

[lukash]

After a discussion on discord it came out Greg's use case is dimming the headlights on the road and blasting them on the trails. For this case dimming the rear light along with the front one is undesirable, if anything, you want it brighter on the road, though leaving it the same should be fine.

Maybe a single slider for just the front headlights would suffice - in that case it could default to the current % value and scale 0-100%.

This is just a single data point though, I'll wait for more before deciding on a solution.