Software from the dark past - Sony Network Walkman NW-E507 drivers for Linux

Remember how I used to hack Sony Network Walkman NW-E507? Well, back then, I succeeded and it did work, but soon after that the device got stolen so I never polished it up to release quality. But even though it isn't release quality and I'm not even sure the code I got is the working one (although commit history does suggest so), I decided to publish it anyway. Perhaps it will be useful to someone.

HTC Dream's notification LED color.

Android documentation says:

public int ledARGB

The color of the led. The hardware will do its best approximation.

Best approximation my ass. I wanted #fb2a0c, I got pink. To get the orange color, I needed #080800, for which orange is most certainly not what I'd call best approximation. It seems that Dreams' drivers just feed the raw RGB values to the hardware without bothering to do any processing on them.

To make it easier to find out which color to feed your device to get the real best approximation of color you want, I made this quick and dirty android LED tester. Just slide the sliders until you're satisfied, note the values and get on with it.

As a note, you might want to only serve the fake colors to devices you tested them on, in case other devices handle this properly and your app would turn out to blink the LED in real #080800, which is to say, almost black. I do this with if (Build.DEVICE.equals("dream")) color = 0xff080800; else color = 0xfffb2a0c; obviously if you test on more devices and they're all equally quirky, you need to add more checks.