Ask HN: Monitor with physical dials for brightness/contrast?

• Lunar

  192 4,380 9.0 Swift

  Intelligent adaptive brightness for your external monitors

Unfortunately we don't have access to lower level communication on macOS. Kexts (Kernel Extensions) have been deprecated and now need System Integrity Protection (SIP) to be disabled. Even with that, you wouldn't have a way to send raw I2C signals to the monitor like ddcctl does on Linux.

_I do discuss these challenges regularly on HN, it's very possible you have read one of my comments._

Lunar provides a Raspberry Pi solution for cases where DDC is really needed and doesn't work from the Mac: https://lunar.fyi/#displaylink-control

The guide leans toward DisplayLink but in fact it works on any monitor, and it was the only solution for DDC when the first M1 Macs appeared: https://alinpanaitiu.com/blog/journey-to-ddc-on-m1-macs/#the...

• twinkle-tray

  19 4,670 3.7 JavaScript

  Easily manage the brightness of your monitors in Windows from the system tray

I've seen monitors with physical brightness/contrast buttons, but it's a difficult feature to search for. You have to see them in person or maybe look at their manuals before buying.

In the meantime, have you tried the DDC/CI protocol (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Display_Data_Channel)? It's a software protocol for controlling real monitor brightness/contrast (as in, it commands the hardware, not just drawing gray overlays).

Windows: https://github.com/xanderfrangos/twinkle-tray

• InfluxDB

  www.influxdata.com featured

  Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.

  

• ddccontrol

  16 569 6.1 C

  DDC Control

  

• ddcvcp

  2 37 10.0 C++

  Arduino library to control external monitors over DDC/CI VCP by slightly abusing the VGA/DVI/HDMI port.

Yes, in my experience, most monitors do accept DDC commands even if the video signal comes from another input as long as the other input keeps the line busy.

For example, on the Pi this was not possible in past, we had to wait for the vc4-kms-v3d GPU driver to get this functionality. Thankfully it’s beta version coincided with the M1 release :)

There’s no DDC dial available, but it’s something I tried doing in the past using an ESP32 that gets Power-over-HDMI [1] and sends DDC through the I2C wires of the HDMI cable [2]

Unfortunately I had to put that on hold as I started a Mac app studio [3] which took most of my time away. (and I also realized I don’t have the means to sell and distribute a hardware project)

[1] https://www.hdmi.org/spec21sub/cablepower

[2] https://github.com/tttttx2/ddcvcp

[3] https://lowtechguys.com/

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