MM keeps going black

flooo

Hey guys,

I installed everything and all runs pretty well.
There is just one problem I am not able to fix. When the MagicMirror runs, the screen will black out after a couple of minutes. I already disabled the power saving, but this seems to only work if the app is not running. That means if I keep the Raspberry on the Desktop, the screen stays on for ever.
I went thru the whole ‘configuration’ part in the read me, but I don’t know how to fix that.

By the way, thanks for that fantastic project

flooo

Ok, I did find a solution on a different forum in the interweb that did work. I post it here, so that if someone else is looking for the same thing, try the following:

Before we start, I did this on a raspberry pi 3, there are a lot of solutions, but most of them don’t work on the pi3.

To prevent the pi from going black, I used a little porgam thats called set.

apt-get install x11-xserver-utils

No you have to open the file: /etc/xdg/lxsession/LXDE/autostart,.

Put the following stuff in it:

xset s off # don't activate screensaver
xset -dpms # disable Energy Star features
xset s noblank # don't blank the video device

Possibly also comment out the line that says @xscreensaver -no-splash, so the file should now look like this:

@lxpanel --profile LXDE
@pcmanfm --desktop --profile LXDE
# @xscreensaver -no-splash
xset s off 
xset -dpms 
xset s noblank

As well make sure you did the stuff from the wiki in the /etc/kbd/config. In this file the following values should be set to the following:

BLANK_TIME=0
BLANK_DPMS=off
POWERDOWN_TIME=0

After you did all this, /reboot the pi.

this worked for me…

cheers, Flo

KirAsh4

Those are configuration settings that are explained in the wiki. However, it’s worth noting that it only works if you have the 'x11-server-utils' package installed as you’ve discovered. On a stock Rasbian Jessie install, that package does get installed, but I suspect those with different distributions, or a Jessie-Lite install won’t have that. I’ll amend the wiki shortly. Thank you.

flooo

I think for noobs like me it would be much easier if you just put the ‘how to install’ with it into the wiki. Of course, people can use google, but why not keep it as simple (and complete) as possible. With this I mean the apt-get stuff…

KirAsh4

True, however that stuff is outside of the scope of the project. We can certainly help (and we do), but to cover every possible situation and solution, that gets to be too much really fast. But I do get what you mean.

RHeniz

Hello I have followed all the steps mentioned here and in the wiki however My raspberry Pi 3 still times out after a few minutes and the screen goes blank. I was wondering if anyone had any ideas that could be the issue. Sorry for such little information I am very new to this and appreciate any help you have to offer.

flooo

So you did install the x11-xserver-utils?
Are you sure everything went fine during that process? So no errors?

RHeniz

@flooo sudo apt-get install x11-xserver-utils worked x11-xserver-utils is installed fine with no errors.