Okay, so this new version of nueKBLight is much, much more simpler and elegant than nueKBLight, and doesn’t come with ANY of the compatibility issues. Forgive the rather simplistic settings panel, but currently there’s only one option – timeout of backlight (oops, should have wrote keyboard backlight). Anyways, to make the backlight never go out (unless drawer is closed), set the timeout to –1. Simple enough?

Why call it nueBacklight you ask? Because it turns out that all the functionality is in the backlight driver. I suspected as much when I wrote nueKBLight, but I guess I know better and my ability to read weird structs that actually turn out to be individual handles has improved. So nueBacklight is pretty much a rewritten backlight driver (again, not just simple patching). I guess features like using light sensor would be next. Any other feature requests? Now would be a good time to ask.

If nueBacklight works fine for everyone, a rewrite of the USB driver is next.

As I haven’t had the time to assemble the download page, you’ll have to download here:

v1.1, Cabinet File (.cab) | 44.17 KB | 1166 downloads
Click here for other and older versions.

nueCPL-Power 0.1 Build 296 is now available for donators who would like to preview it in the download repository. A short changelog is provided below:

(1) Use newly obtained temperature curve from ADC calibration
(2) Allow temperature display in multiple units (C, F, ADC Units).

Hopefully this will allow you to monitor temperature levels on the battery a bit better. nueKBLight is next.

New version of nueBattery2 available, main improvements are temperature settings in human readable temperatures, and an “Allow no battery on AC” setting. Don’t get too excited though, as you’ll need a kernel hack in order for this setting to work properly.

As I’m a bit too lazy (busy) to put up a page, you’ll have to resort to downloading the new version on this page. Updated version of nuePower-CPL with proper temperature reading coming in a bit as well…

v1.1, Cabinet File (.cab) | 62.18 KB | 872 downloads
Click here for other and older versions.

I decided to obtain some kind of ADC calibration, so I took out a semi-accurate thermometer, attached it to my Touch Pro battery, and made some sort of device to put my Touch Pro above the range while I took measurements. I obtained the curve on the right, which as you can see, is very linear (R² = 0.9961) . It should be about right, translating the low cutoff to about 45 °C and the high cutoff to about 0 °C. I also wanted to make sure the curve was linear for the entire range, but putting my Touch Pro in the freezer took too long to cool it in these summer temperatures, I only got it down to 30 °C. For those of you who don’t want to read graphs, to convert the ADC value to a temperature in degrees Celsius, use the formula:

Temp °C = –0.0386 x ADC Value + 149.94

And to convert it back, if you’re bad at algebra:

ADC Value = (Temp °C – 149.94) / –0.0386

I’ll update nuePower to use this new formula, as well as the nueBattery2 settings app.

After a long night of coding, and I mean long…. nueBattery2 for the Touch Diamond / Touch Pro CDMA is finally ready for release, as a beta. I tried to make a preliminary control panel for it, so pardon the ugly GUI – I’ll get that improved and integrated into nuePower eventually.

Some of the improvements over the old nuePower driver include selectable options, better registry querying interface, low power shutdown control, and temperature cutoff overrides. The battery driver is also rebuilt from the ground up – it’s not a simple patch.

Unfortunately, I haven’t had time to calibrate the ADC, and wouldn’t trust myself to do so at the moment. This basically means you’ll have to deal with ugly raw ADC units, which if you’ll note the text next to temperature limit, have a quirk where lower values are higher. This means you’ll probably want to lower the “low cutoff” in order to keep your device charging while its hot. The “high cutoff” keeps the battery from charging when its too cold (or more likely, when readings are out of range).

I’d make a page for the download, but I’ll save that for later since I really need sleep. The fact that the sun is coming up probably isn’t good. Anyway, do download below and let me know how it works for you.

And the standard warning applies: this is beta quality software that may damage your device, cause loss of data, cause your phone to explode, cause harm or death to yourself or others, download at your own risk.

v1.1, Cabinet File (.cab) | 62.18 KB | 872 downloads
Click here for other and older versions.

No, I can’t stop the Touch Pro from getting hot, but we can try to keep it charging while its hot. I’ve found that the battery driver shuts the charger off when it gets a raw ADC reading above 3,904 or below 2,624. I’m not sure what it translates to, but at the high end, its supposedly 45 degrees Celsius. I can make that amount adjustable, which should resolve some of the problems people are having, without having to run an app every time…

I’ve also successfully added so you can turn on/off rounding, and low power shutdown. Once I have the temperature stuff complete I think it’ll be ready for a beta release.

And, in terms of what’s next, a much better version of nueKBLight is next… and maybe an attempt at fixing the keyboard lag?

I was able to “frankenstein” the battery driver for the Touch Pro/Diamond, so we might actually be looking at an elegant solution to the over temperature problems soon. If what I’ve just done for the battery drivers applies for the kernel as well, that probably means we can get wm6.5 kernel working with the Touch Pro soon… This basically means I can arbitrarily relink and inject random code into already compiled binaries – no more patching! 

But first, I need sleep! More on this tomorrow… Also, thanks for the input on nueROM, guess I’ll evaluate my options. The thing is, I’ll actually need to build ROMs from scratch for the next step, so we’ll see.

Well, as one reader pointed out, "Coming soon..." can only be for so long. There's a number of reasons that it ended up being postponed - a few which I will highlight below:

Too Ambitious
When I built the original nueROM for Titan, I got increasingly frustrated with the tools used to build ROMs. It was really easy to make a small mistake that would break from build to build. So I wrote some apps to take care of scripting... But I wanted more control... So I started writing my own tools... and it went on and on from there, until I started spending too much time writing tools and not enough time building ROMS.

Priorities
I ended up spending a lot of time figuring out things that led to dead ends, like FM radio, instead of building ROMs...

Manila
Manila really threw a curveball at me. It was difficult to customize to every user's liking, and .. it was just so bloated and unstable that it made the ROM not work, not to mention hours of frustration. Probably should have left it out.

Personal
I had a lot of shifts in personal goals and direction during this time, so this affected the amount of time I could dedicate to working on it.

But looking forward, maybe it would be better to suspend the project. That or it's not something I should work on myself, i.e. ... maybe this should be a team project? We'll see.

I obtained a copy of battery.dll and have patched the TP2 CDMA driver for 1% increments. You can find the driver here, be sure to download the CDMA version. FastCharge for the TP2 CDMA won’t be ready until I get my hands on a TP2, which will be as soon as Sprint lets it out their doors….

I’ve delved into the battery driver and it looks like there’s a bug in the driver that’s causing it to shut down the charge too early…

Temperature is measured via an ADC via a probe (on the battery, hopefully…), but the measurement on the ADC seems to need to be compensated for some adjustment factor (it appears in the driver as TCompensation). The cutoff doesn’t use the compensation factor before it shuts off the charge circuit, which is probably causing the problem.

It is interesting to note that GSM users don’t really have this problem unless they tether and bittorrent, which leads me to believe that 1xRTT just takes a LOT of power…

Anyway, once I creatively design a way to adjust the cutoff temperatures, I’ll be releasing a new version of nueBatteryDriver with cutoff temperature control. Also, once I get my hands on a Touch Pro2 CDMA battery.dll, I’ll be releasing a version of nueBatteryDriver for that platform as well.