Automatically set your keyboard's backlight based on your Mac's ambient light sensor.

Karl Shea

Last update: Aug 6, 2022

Related tags

Utility QMKAmbientBacklight

Overview

QMK Ambient Backlight

Automatically set your keyboard's backlight based on your Mac's ambient light sensor.

Compatibility

macOS Big Sur or later, a Mac with a built-in ambient light sensor, and a keyboard running the the QMK firmware.

This app supports LEDs that work with QMK's backlight, it currently doesn't work with any other type of LED driver (e.g. LED Matrix, etc).

Instructions

For this app to work, the installed firmware has the following additional requirements:

A decent number of levels set for BACKLIGHT_LEVELS in your config.h (e.g. 10–20 or more, otherwise you'll have very abrupt brightness changes)

And Either

VIA enabled (VIA_ENABLE = yes in your rules.mk)

Or

RAW_ENABLE = yes in your rules.mk
The contents of example-keymap.c included in your keymap.c

The application will monitor the ambient light sensor and send a backlight value to the firmware in the range 0–255. Either VIA or a handler in raw_hid_receive() will map that range into the range set for BACKLIGHT_LEVELS in your keymap's config.h.

Download

QMK Ambient Backlight is available for free, and it's also open-source. If you prefer, you can pay any amount you'd like in order to support my work.

Get the latest build on Gumroad.

Acknowledgements

This is my first macOS/SwiftUI project. Most of the project structure was inspired by and the entirety of the code for the ambient light sensor was taken from DarkModeBuddy by Guilherme Rambo.