Nice visual feedback: switch off buttonlight while select-button is pressed

[fruchtschwert]

My proposal was intended for the Sansa e200, but should also work for other players which have a buttonlight available. I tried it out with my Sansa which has an illuminated scrollring as buttonlight.

Now my proposal:

When the user is pressing the select-button (for example to choose an entry from the menu) the button-driver should turn off the light of the scrollring as long as the button is pressed. When you release the button it turns on again. It then appears as if the buttonlight is kind of "flashing" for a moment.

This is a nice visual feedback for pressing the button.
I already implemented it and tried it with my Sansa .. looks quite nice.

You can find the patch on Flyspray (FS#9857). Only one file needs to be changed.

http://www.rockbox.org/tracker/task/9857?project=1&type=4&order=dateopened&sort=desc

The only problem I could see with this is the following:
Maybe the lifetime of the LEDs will be decreased by switching off and on the buttonlight too frequently.
Does this come into count compared to the on/off-cycles caused by the normal timeout? What do you think?

Regards
Martin

[Multiplex]

I like the idea, and afer some thought I thought I would offer this observation;

Mostly whe I'm using my C240 the backlight and Buttonlight are off, they come on when I press a button (and I have a fairly short timeout on the button light to save battey), so with your enhancement the buton LED would imediately go out, then back on when I released the button, and off again fairly quickly.

So how about a modification so that the LED is only on when the buttons are pressed?

Just a thoght.

[fruchtschwert]

Hey ..

thanks for your feedback.
I think your idea should also be easy to implement.
I will try it, when I have time in the next days (although I'm rather a lucky code-hacker than a real rockbox-developer

I also uploaded compiled versions of my modified rockbox, if anyone wants to try out ..

Sansa e200:
http://fruchtsalat.uni.cc/res/rockbox-full-buttonlight-e200.zip

Sansa c200:
http://fruchtsalat.uni.cc/res/rockbox-full-buttonlight-c200.zip