Add ability to turn off heartbeat LED blinking

[ndoo]

Fixes #3635 and depends on protobufs PR #485.

This only affects the GPIO-controllable LED and may be desirable behavior for Meshtastic users who sleep in the vicinity of their node and are annoyed by the blinking LED, especially for boards that indicate charging when USB power is connected, resulting in a 1 second LED illumination cycle.

Most boards however, have a non-GPIO controlled power LED (i.e. hardwired to VBUS/VCC/etc.) that can only be turned off by desoldering or otherwise removing that LED. This can't be addressed by firmware changes.

Implemented as inhibiting rather than status_led because having status_led = true by default will cause status LED to get disabled for users upgrading from previous firmware due to installDefaultConfig not being run.

[thebentern]

Looks good but needs a trunk fmt. I hate how bright that stupid white LED is on the heltec!

[garthvh]

This is not going to provide a dark mode, can we just reduce the brightness of the heltec and not affect every device?

[thebentern]

This is not going to provide a dark mode, can we just reduce the brightness of the heltec and not affect every device?

This just allows the user to disable the blinking white LED. I think it potentially also has some utility if we can repurpose the status LED for use with ext. notifications to control the behavior instead, in #3673

[ndoo]

This is not going to provide a dark mode, can we just reduce the brightness of the heltec and not affect every device?

The default behavior of this change does not affect any device unless the user specifically flips the configuration toggle.

Reducing brightness adds a lot of complexity/refactoring to the blink routine as we have to configure and attach the ESP32 PWM LEDC to the pin, as well as adding the necessary protobuf config to support configuring the brightness to make this feature available to all other boards. Hardcoding the brightness is also possible, but then we become responsible to choose the brightness that most users would find comfortable.

Hardcoding this for just the Heltec will still require changing the main.cpp ledBlinker routine, it seems more straightforward to just implement a flag to turn the LED off entirely for users who are affected by the blinking behavior.

[ndoo]

Looks good but needs a trunk fmt. I hate how bright that stupid white LED is on the heltec!

trunk fmt fixed with latest force push

[ndoo]

Thanks for the major refactoring work and glad to see its inclusion.

[punkpar]

Thankyou all for following up my initial feature request. I'm still new to GitHub, will this feature be in the next alpha release of meshtastic?

[todd-herbert]

will this feature be in the next alpha release of meshtastic?

This pull request was included in 2.3.7, but I believe there was a bug in the code, so the feature might not be usable until 2.3.8.

I don't believe either of the phone Apps allow you to change this setting just now. You can set it with the python CLI though, if you're interested to see what happens.

[punkpar]

Thank you todd-herbert, does this need requesting in the Android and iPhone firmware section, or is this something that will naturally be implemented?

[todd-herbert]

To be honest, I don't know exactly what will happen with the different apps, but I'm sure the developers behind them are aware of the situation; no need to worry about opening requests.