Automatically turn display on and off - with exceptions

[oocube]

I configured Touchkio and it nicely displays my dashboard. But it stayed always on. So I used raspi-config to add screen blanking and .config/labwc/autostart to configure a blank after 60 seconds. It works as expected.

Now there are two conditions when I do not want the screen to blank at all:

• when I have excess solar power
• at the time from 6:00 to 8:00 in the morning

Both events might come from Homeassistant - but how can they be actioned? Does touchkio provide a setting like 'keep screen on' as media players do?

Edit: I see that touchkio offers a homeassistant entity to turn the display on/off. It would be cool to have some on/auto/off with auto adhering to a configurable timeout. Then all I had to do were to switch between on and auto.

[CaptainAni187]

You can get the on/auto behaviour today by moving the blanking from labwc into Home Assistant. TouchKio publishes two entities over MQTT that are enough for this:

• Display: a light entity, so you can turn the screen on and off (and set brightness if your panel supports it).
• Last Active: a sensor with the minutes since the last touch on the kiosk.

First remove the swayidle ... wlopm line from ~/.config/labwc/autostart. The README mentions that once TouchKio turns the display back on, swayidle still thinks it's off and won't blank it again until there's some interaction, so the two end up fighting each other.

Then let an automation do the blanking with your exceptions as conditions:

alias: Kiosk screen blanking
triggers:
  - trigger: numeric_state
    entity_id: sensor.touchkio_last_active
    above: 1
conditions:
  - condition: not
    conditions:
      - condition: time
        after: "06:00:00"
        before: "08:00:00"
  - condition: state
    entity_id: binary_sensor.excess_solar
    state: "off"
actions:
  - action: light.turn_off
    target:
      entity_id: light.touchkio_display

The entity ids depend on your device name, and binary_sensor.excess_solar stands for whatever you use to detect surplus power. A touch on the blank screen still wakes it, and if you want it to come back on by itself at 6:00 or when the surplus starts, a second automation with light.turn_on on those triggers does it.

Last Active counts whole minutes, so this blanks after about a minute of no touches rather than exactly 60 seconds. Set above to however many minutes you like.

[oocube]

Sounds well doable, and much easier than I feared. Thanks a lot!