Credit to Alan (aka alansplace) for making me look into this on an unrelated topic. Thank you, you made me hardware-hack my PW today.
Do not worry, all that is needed is a small magnet and any way to strap it to the PW so that it can be easily removed / reattached. That is it on hardware needed.
Now how to turn the light OFF? Follow these 2 steps:
1) disable screensaver in search bar by entering and hitting return after this:
2) attach your magnet so PW would normally go to sleep with wake / sleep function
Ta Da, the light is off.
Few things you need to know:
- you can't enter screensaver sleep mode by closing the cover or pushing the button shortly - nothing will happen other than the light turns off when using cover (that is where the magnet above comes in)
- you can still put PW to sleep, but you must remove the magnet, push power button for few seconds (about 4 maybe) to enter white screen sleep mode.
Again, light must be turned on, or PW won't enter white screen sleep mode
- the screensaver will not come on after 10 minutes (thought I mention that as
~ds disables that)
- the light can be turned on and off by simply removing / attaching magnet
- to return normal operation a restart is necessary (menu->settings, then menu->restart) - screensaver is back , attaching the magnet sleeps device again
- last not least:
does not require Jailbreak or USB Network
Happy Hacking
p.s.: Thank you Amazon for this undocumented feature.
Update: See post #80 or directly this post for a nice guide on what magnet to use and where to put it. That post is for waking / sleeping with a cover. So you need to adjust accordingly to make it work for turning the light off. See picture #5 there for placement.