Been using a pair of reTerminal units for the past few months to help develop a touchscreen GUI. One issue that I have found can occur semi-frequently is the main LCB screen going blank (as if the screen is in sleepmode) . The display is black, the touchscreen unresponsive, but you are still able to SSH into the device to send command. A manual power cycle will clear the issue and the touch screen will be visible again.
Are there any known reasons that could cause the screen to Become unresponsive? Or methods detect and then reboot the desktop if the LCD fails to load. I need the touchscreen to handle button inputs for a user interface but this becomes impossible to access once the screen fails.
Other information:
5V power is being applied from the GPIO header instead of the USB-C input.
reTerminal is being run continuously for ideally 24/7 monioring.
Temperatures are stable, even under heavy use the internal temperture reading never rises above 60 degrees C.
No issues with memory leaks - CPU usage averages 40-50%
Any assistance or ability to help me decode this issue would be appreciated.
interesting I have a similar but not identical issue - also have 2 reterminals running 7/24 with MQTT to receive messages (and using MagicMirror and my own python overlay). At times, the display turns off but 90% of the time touching on the display will wake up the display again. the other 10% I do need to reboot/power cycle. Screen blanking is disabled. Same software on many other PI configurations do not exhibit this symptom at all.
I will look to confirm if I can ssh (when in this state).
I thought it was my config/software but perhaps there is indeed another possibility here.
I use normal power (not GPIO) and stock OS. Temp is low (low 40s).CPU is normally < 15%.
I do use Bluetooth a lot (always polling to detect my smart phone - to activate what is shown on reterminal display when detected)
It is more an annoyance for me (at this moment), so I haven’t spent too much time to look into it yet.
thanks
Installing xscreensaver solved this for me.
The Green power button (which is not a power button) seems to wake the screen for me. Actually F1,F2,F3,Power should so do since as defaults they only send an ‘a’, ‘s’, ‘d’, ‘f’ character code as a keyboard device would.
