with version 7:(
Earlier this week I'm flying a 6 hour route survey that started at 4pm where I have follow the purple line within +/- 1.5nm. Luckily 3 of us have GPS so we didn't bother to progam the internal unit mainly because it's a pain to enter way points. So there I was with my iFly 720 everything going fine. BAM at 7p on the dot the screen goes dark! It didn't shut down I could still see it but just barely. I fiddled with it for a bit, think something jarred loose? Then I thought the light must have burned out. Luckily my friend with his ifly 700 still running v6 software passes it over to me only to discover his way points were off:( <- user error.
So long story short, I figured it out. The system was set for nite mode from 7p-7a, i had forgot about the setting in ce for this, and it dimmed the screen completely because I never bothered to set it as the new version of software just seemed to overwrite or ignore the setting and sets it for full brightness everytime at startup. Surprisingly the navigation software is still not smart enough to figure this out. Instead of trying to fiddle with screen buttons that I couldn't see, I simply unplugged my unit for 30 seconds and wait for it to die. Then plugged it back in. After about 2 minutes because I still can't see the screen I just pressed the middle where the big navigation icon usually sits. About another minute later the screen brightness returns as the navigation loads only now it's FULL brightness in the twilight so I have to spend the next minute or so to readjust the level with the in app settings to put it in the nite mode display.
Any chances fixing this? Maybe making it more intellegently like the car navigation systems from Mio, Garmin, magellan and tomtom which are able to automagically switch day and nite and let you configure the brightness and pallets. All modern units seem to know when sunset/rise is from the almanac for the current timezone and location. It would have been fine to keep the user defined brightness setting and just switch the pallet from day to nite.