This software makes the Fujitsu-Siemens Loox N560 more bearable at night. This is old (2005) hardware and this project is probably useless now so this page is just here for archive purposes.
I found that when reading e-books or navigating using TomTom5 at night, the keylights (the little blue lights that light up the application keys) were so bright as to distract from the screen, especially when having the screen brightness down low so as not to wake up the missus.
After a ridiculous amount of work, including learning how to write C++ for windows mobile 5, not to mention pouring over the specs for the PXA270 processor and learning what an ASIC was, I managed to acquire some mightily impressive bags under my eyes, and this little program.
The program turns off the key LEDs, the orange power LED and the bluetooth/wifi/gps LEDs when run. To reset them back to default, simply put the N560 into suspend and the resume it again (actually you can do almost anything, as FS seem to have seen fit to turn the lights back on at every available opportunity). I decided to turn off the power LED as well as the key LEDs, as this light is always on when the N560 is in my powered cradle in the car, and can be distracting at night.
I wrote this software for myself, and as such it is not supported in any way, if your precious PDA explodes due to it’s use, don’t blame me.
Truly no-one but me will ever realise just how much work went into this tiny tiny program. I hope you enjoy it.
| Download | Copy the EXE file to your Loox and run it, there is no installer, though I may add one if I get asked enough, and can work out how to make a cab file. |
17/08/06 v0.2 – Changed the way the program changes the registers, solves the bluetooth problems
There is also a piece of software now named LooxLight based on a reversed engineered copy of KeylightC, which gives far greater control over the lights and runs as a service which gets around the problem of the lights coming back on.
7th June 2007 – I’ve now moved away from the N560, mostly because Orange gave me a free HTC Trinity which does everything the N560 does, faster, with better support, and includes a phone, but also due to dismal post sales from FS, who give the impression that they care nothing for their customers beyond selling them the device in the first place.
NO updates for the 560 in its life thus far (still no support for WPA2+AES, no plans to to provide a WM6 upgrade for it, even a costed one). In my opinion they are ignoring one for the fundament benefits of this type of platform, it can evolve. Thankfully, due to the efforts of some good manufacturers out there, there is the assumption that if a product doesn’t support X feature out of the box, then there was likely not time to implement if at release and it will come later. This is not the case with FS, once it released, that’s what you get. I don’t expect I’ll be buying another Fujitsu Siemens PDA.