Matrix Orbital Corp

Hey i was thinking wouldnt it be great if the backlight of the LCD screen and a neon light could be turned on when it starts to get dark using an LDR or any other light sensor.
Ive been told i would need to write my own plug in for this to work.
Do you:-
A) Like the idea?
B) know anything that may help me as i have Modding knowledge apart from painting cutting and glueing?
C) think im wasting my time?

Feed back would be very usefull. However i wont be trying this for a while cause i kinda have some important exams coming up and i have no cash to get hold of anything usefull. But hey i can plan ahead.

a) yeah
c) no
b) okay, maybe I'm a hardware geek but it seems to me you wouldn't need a plugin. Just make a circuit that emulates a keypad press when the light level changes, and bickety-bam.

I'd need to think about it for a while, but the 4066 chip is a nice (cheap easy) way to interface logic-level crap to your keypad inputs. So then it would be a phototransistor (easiest) to do your light sensing, and I think the whole deal could be maybe a five-dollar project tops. The trickier parts in my mind are: I dunno how the keypad would react to the 'key' remaining closed for a long time, and how would your arrange trimming so the analog light level got reliable translated to a digital control input for the 4066, but both are pretty tractable problems. I just can't solve it completely without breadboarding it.

Yeah ive been thinking about a bit more now and emailed my friend how is better at h/w them me. Well hes better at soldering then me.

You idea sounds great however would it be better if it just sent a signal everytime it passed the thresh hold for the light. Also wouldnt i have to use a variable resistor to set out how dark i want the thresh hold to be?.

But cheers. All i need now is about $120 + P&P and a lump of plastic and i can do it.