ColorHug ALS Is An Open-Source Ambient Light Sensor

[phoronix]

Phoronix: ColorHug ALS Is An Open-Source Ambient Light Sensor

The ColorHug ALS is an ambient light sensor developed by Richard Hughes to dynamically control the brightness of laptop panels -- for laptops that don't have a built-in light sensor for said purpose...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=ColorHug-ALS-Light-Sensor

[Adarion]

Does it really need Gnome (3)? Nah. I hope the driver is generic enough so implementation works generally, on console, KDE, fluxbox, XFCE, gnome, plain twm and everything else. Other than that it looks nice. I guess the price is due to small charge and enclosure + fully laid out USB plug.

[rdnetto]

Going by the picture, it looks a bit bulky. It looks like the only reason it requires Gnome is because he's integrated the management logic into it.

I implemented a much simpler solution to the same problem a while ago, using a Python script to take picture with the webcam, estimate ambient brightness based on the mean value, and apply a linear mapping to get a setting for the screen brightness. Not quite as seamless, but works quite well, in my experience.