MacBook Tray Tools v0.3 beta

Drivers for keyboard backlight and sensors of your MacBook / Pro
by Dmitri Vostryh

If you happened to be a happy MacBook / MacBook Pro owner running Windows with
Bootcamp,  you surely felt annoyed of current lack of driver support for some
neat features offered by this beautiful piece of hardware. For example the
keyboard backlight and automatic brightness adjustment based on environment
light is completely lacking any drivers. How long would it take for Apple to
release the complete set of drivers and how well the Apple hardware will be
supported under Windows compared to Mac OS X, nobody can say for sure. The
recent release of Bootcamp did not include this support, next release can take
time.

I put together a small tray resident application which lets you activate and
control the keyboard light, it also accesses the light sensors to resemble the
automatic light adjustment to the ambient light as you know it from Mac OSX.

This application is a freeware, feel free to download and use it.
The application comes with no guarantee, use it on your own risk. 

I would like to thank Nicolas Boichat (http://www.boichat.ch) and
Niklas Jakob for providing the initial Apple SMC I/O code.

The application incorporates a inpout32 i/o driver developed by
http://www.logix4u.net

Features

 * Control the keyboard backlight and freely adjust the brightness
 * Automatically control the keyboard light based on the ambient light
 * Various configuration options allowing you to adjust the behaviour

Whats new in v0.3 beta:
 * Easier setup. Eliminated giveio driver dependency, using inpout32 instead.
   The hardware interface driver is installed automatically on demand.

Whats new in v0.2 beta:
 * Fixed crash occurring after hibernation
 * Accidentally covering one of the sensors will not disable the backlight.
 * Lazy reaction on ambient light changes, ignoring temporary oversaturation
   of the light sensors. Abrupt temporary light changes will not cause keyboard
   backlight to go off and on.
 * Motion sensor measurements are displayed correctly now
 

Installing MacBook Tray Tools

(If you are upgrading an older MacBook Tray Tools version, you may want to
uninstall the GIVEIO driver first. Start the loaddrv.exe, specify path
to giveio.sys driver and press Stop then Uninstall.)

1. Copy the MacBookTrayTools.exe to any location you find appropriate,
for example to "C:\Program Files\MacBook Tray tools\"

2. Create a shortcut in your Startup group to make sure the app is loaded
at the next windows restart.

3. Launch the tray tools. If you're running the tool first time, it will
install the required i/o driver.
   
Icon will appear in your tray, right click it to see the available options.
By default the tray tools are configured to automatically adjust the light
based on ambient light sensor data.

Enjoy.

Known Issues

 * Too bright LCD may prevent the keyboard backlight from turning on. 
   Raise the thresholds in the configuration to fix the problem.

 * Sometimes sensors seem to "get used" to the darker environment and start
   report higher light levels. Exposing the sensors to the light will
   recalibrate them.

 
 - Dmitri

mailto:dmitri.v@gmail.com
http://dmitri.v.googlepages.com/macbooktraytools

