Hi all
Just got the minilab. Awesome kit, and I’ ve just made a servo move with Arduino 
One thing though - I find the displays overly bright, even to my middle aged eyes. Is there a way to turn down the brightness a couple of notches?
/Preben
Hi, using Adafruit_SSD1306 library, try to call function display.dim(true)
Cheers Arnas, but I understand now I was quite unclear: I’m talking about the LED displays for the Volt meters built into the Minilab itself.
I saw there’s a way to calibrate the voltage readings after a firmware update, but is there perhaps a way to also access the LED dimming settings?
(I reckon a younger dude would’ve modified and updated the lab board firmware in a breeze, but even though I actually am an electronics engineer, I never did much programming. I’m an analogue guy and more familiar with Bode plots and waveguides than MCU’s Not that programming courses would’ve been of much help: my masters degree is from back in the days of Basic, Fortran 77 and Pascal. Concurrent Euclid was gaining ground, though! 
)
Hi
I had this problem last year and Karolis sent me a firmware update V1.03 which dimmed the LEDs to 20%. It worked for me but I don’t know if there is a newer update.
Cheers - that’s kind of what I was hoping for: a firmware fix.
But it seems the latest version available officially is 1.01.
@KarolisT : any chance you could make that version available?
Best
/Preben
The whole story for the brightness was that I wanted to add it as an entry in the menu list in the menu system so you can configure the level of brightness that works for you, but didn’t yet get around to that yet. Here’s a link to the firmware image that I’ve sent tiffinpf a while back: here, that you can use until the official release is made.
The difficulty with the current version of labboard is that we don’t have a user-friendly way of upgrading the firmware, so you need to use SWD pins for that. We have made a document on that, available here.
I’m hopeful we’ll get that version our soon
1 Like
Thanks for the information and the links, Karolis.
I have managed to update the firmware on a QRP radio a few years back, using, in-circuit programming, but that one has an AVR microcontroller. So the little pocket programmer I bought back then won’t do me much good.
The instructions you linked to mentions that those ST-LINK/V2 programmers should be available for purchase at totemmaker.net, but I can’t find one in the shop. Are they out of stock?
/P
Well if you did it with AVR it should be an even easier feat here – just the only thing is that it requires extra hardware, and AVR ones won’t work due to different protocols there. I’ll look into the availability of programmers in our shop – I remember we had them placed in the shop at the time, but must’ve been taken out for whatever reason, I’ll come back to this topic with my findings.
For the future revisions of labboard we’ll definitely look into a solution of updating without the need of external programmers – parts availability is very limited, so we need to dance around possible replacements for almost every component on the board, which makes the process somewhat slower than we’d like
With a new firmware, display brightness can now be adjusted in setting menu: https://docs.totemmaker.net/labboard/features/setup/#display