eyesome

Eyesome will control up to three monitors including hardware laptop display. Each day sunrise and sunset times are automatically retrievedfor your city. Configure Daytime and Nighttime brightness and gamma levels for your monitors. Configure the transition duration after sunrise and before sunset to gradually adjust brightness and gamma levels so changes are not noticable.

Prerequisites

Internet access is required to access https://www.timeanddate.com each day to obtain your city's sunrise and sunset times.

yad GUI windowing is required to use eyesome-cfg.sh, the heart of eyesome.

For controlling external monitors, xrandr is required. wayland is not supported. If you don't know what Wayland is then you are fine because Xrandr has been primarily used for 35 years.

Configuration

From your terminal run sudo eyesome-cfg which configures all your monitors and operates as a control center for:

• overriding your country/city name if eyesome didn't detect automatically
• overriding your hardware /sys/class/*/brightness directory if needed
• overriding your xrandr software names for external monitors if needed
• defining daytime and nightime brightness/gamma (color temperature)
• testing daytime and nighttime brightness/gamma (color temperature)
• setting transition period after sunrise to full monitor brighness
• setting transition period before sunset for reducing monitor brightness
• along with brightess, gamma can also be set (night light, redshift, etc.)
• setting how quickly brightness/gamma changes are made during transitions
• viewing the next interval brightess/gamma will be set
• viewing the last interval's setting of brightness/gamma per monitor
• overriding eyesome daemon to manually set brightness/gamma for a period
• input gamma with red, green, blue values or use a color temperature slider

For screen shots please see: https://askubuntu.com/a/887249/307523

Automatic operations

When you boot your computer a script in /etc/cron.d is run to load the eyesome daemon: eyesome.sh. This will run 24/7 and spend most of it's time sleeping in the background to consume as little computer resources as possible.

When you suspend and resume your computer a script in /etc/systemd/system-sleep runs wake-eyesome.sh to instantly adjust your screen brightness. This is useful if you suspend your laptop at full brightness during day and then wake it up at night.

When your laptop lid is opened or closed the control file /etc/acpi/events/lid-event-eyesome calls the script /etc/acpi/acpi-lid-eyesome.sh. This in turn calls wake-eyesome.sh to reset brightness and gamma on all monitors. This is necessary because linux resets all monitors to full brightness 1.00 and full gamma 1.00 using xrandr when the laptop lid is closed or opened.

Each morning the control file /etc/cron.daily/daily-eyes-sun calls the script eyesome-sun.sh. This script obtain the current day's sunrise and sunset times from https://www.timeanddate.com.

Installation

1. Download the zip file and extract it using Archive Manager or another tool.

2. Open a terminal and change to the download directory. eg cd ~/eyesome-MASTER

3. Mark the file install.sh as executable with the command:

   sudo chmod a+x install.sh

4. Run the install program using:

   sudo ./install.sh

   If you don't have the program yad installed you will be prompted to install it. Proceed to install it by entering y or Y. It is needed in order to run eyesome's configuration program.

5. Configure your monitors using:

   sudo eyesome-cfg.sh

6. Note after saving configuration for the frist time you are prompted to update Sunrise and Sunset times as they haven't been initialized yet. You are also prompted to start the eyesome dameon because you haven't rebooted your computer yet. Go ahead and accept both these prompts. You should never see them again after the first time configuration.

7. Default sunrise and sunset files called /usr/local/bin/.eyesome-sunrise and /usr/local/bin/.eyesome-sunset are in the download but not installed. After installation you will need to copy these files if you want to manually set the time for eyesome by updating these plain text files. Do this if you don't want the internet knowing which city you are really in when you are using a VPN to hide your ISP's city. The file format is plain text and the defaults are "7:00 am" for sunrise and "9:00 pm" for sunset. Use the command cat /usr/local/bin/.eyesome-sun* to see current sunrise and sunset times.

Note:

You can also use ./isntall.sh -h or ./install.sh --help for help instructions.

You can use sudo ./install.sh v to verify MD5 hash checksums agree which means your download is intact and secure.

You can use sudo ./install.sh rm to remove the eyesome programs. You can install them again later and your configuration files will still be intact.

Glitches

Every now and then (once a month?) your system may inexplicably invoke xrandr and reset your system to 100% brightness and gamma (6500K color temperature). If this happens simply run sudo eyesome-cfg.sh and click the Daytimne or Nighttime Test buttons. After the test eyesome is forced to wakeup and reset monitors to the current time of day settings. Do the same if you intentionally change settings in gnome-terminal or elsewhere and are ready to set them back to normal.

Messages

To see eyesome daemon messages the eaiest way is with the terminal command:

journalctl -b | grep eyesome

You will see this from when your computer boots:

Oct 23 04:16:28 CRON[965]: (root) CMD (   /usr/local/bin/eyesome.sh)
Oct 23 04:16:28 eyesome[998]: Daemon: Launching /usr/local/bin/eyesome-dbus.sh daemon
Oct 23 04:16:28 eyesome[1014]: DBUS: Starting DBUS-Monitor using type=method_call, interface=org.freedesktop.ColorManager, path=/org/freedesktop/ColorManager, member=FindDeviceByProperty

You will see this from when you sign on (login):

Oct 23 04:16:35 eyesome[2107]: DBUS: Event Count: 5 over: 7 seconds
Oct 23 04:16:35 eyesome[2114]: DBUS: Waiting for user to log in, not waking up eyesome
Oct 23 04:16:48 eyesome[2465]: Daemon: Waited 20 seconds for rick to login.
Oct 23 04:16:53 eyesome[2908]: DBUS: Event Count: 27 over: 18 seconds
Oct 23 04:16:53 eyesome[2917]: DBUS: rick logged in 5 seconds, not waking eyesome
Oct 23 04:16:59 eyesome[4111]: Daemon: Login: Slept 2 seconds x 5 times.

You will see this when cron runs daily jobs:

Oct 23 04:25:31 eyesome[2206]: Sun Times: https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/canada/edmonton.
Oct 23 04:25:32 eyesome[2278]: Wakeup: Called from eyesome-sun.sh.

You will see this when you suspend your home laptop and head off to work:

Oct 23 05:46:49 eyesome[26964]: Lid Open/Close: Wait 3 seconds to see if suspending
Oct 23 05:46:50 eyesome[27017]: DBUS: Event Count: 27 over: 5397 seconds
Oct 23 05:46:50 eyesome[27028]: Wakeup: Called from eyesome-dbus.sh.
Oct 23 05:46:50 eyesome[27079]: Wakeup: DBUS: Waiting 3 seconds to see if supending
Oct 23 05:46:52 eyesome[27170]: Lid Open/Close: DBUS responding, not waking eyesome
Oct 23 05:47:04 eyesome[28119]: Daemon: Monitor connect: Slept 2 seconds x 5 times.
Oct 23 05:47:04 eyesome[28122]: Daemon: Removed file: /tmp/eyesome-DBUS
Oct 23 05:47:06 eyesome[28308]: Wakeup: Creating /tmp/eyesome-is-suspending

You will see this when you return home from work:

Oct 23 16:55:11 eyesome[28511]: Lid Open/Close: Wait 3 seconds to see if suspending
Oct 23 16:55:11 eyesome[28578]: Wakeup: Called from suspend.
Oct 23 16:55:14 eyesome[28792]: DBUS: Event Count: 54 over: 40104 seconds
Oct 23 16:55:14 eyesome[28798]: Wakeup: Called from eyesome-dbus.sh.
Oct 23 16:55:14 eyesome[28804]: Wakeup: DBUS: Waiting 3 seconds to see if supending
Oct 23 16:55:14 eyesome[28807]: Lid Open/Close: System supending, not waking eyesome
Oct 23 16:55:17 eyesome[29319]: Wakeup: System supending, Cancel DBUS waking eyesome
Oct 23 16:55:26 eyesome[30689]: Daemon: Resuming: Slept 2 seconds x 5 times.
Oct 23 16:55:26 eyesome[30704]: Daemon: Removed file: /tmp/eyesome-is-suspending
Oct 23 16:55:26 eyesome[30715]: Daemon: Removed file: /tmp/eyesome-DBUS
Oct 23 16:59:48 eyesome[13909]: DBUS: Event Count: 51 over: 273 seconds
Oct 23 16:59:48 eyesome[13922]: Wakeup: Called from eyesome-dbus.sh.
Oct 23 16:59:49 eyesome[13965]: Wakeup: DBUS: Waiting 3 seconds to see if supending
Oct 23 17:00:03 eyesome[15222]: Daemon: Monitor connect: Slept 2 seconds x 5 times.
Oct 23 17:00:03 eyesome[15225]: Daemon: Removed file: /tmp/eyesome-DBUS

If you unplug one of your external monitors, or turn it off or on you will also see messages similar to above.