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Screen saver keep alive?

By Scott MacDonald @scottmac
    2023-04-13 13:14:11.555Z

    I'm curious to know if there's any way to keep the screen saver of my connected PC from activating while I'm away? Is there a command line way to interact with the keyboard where I could send a keystroke every X minutes? Or is there a way to send a small mouse movement every so often?

    • 3 replies
    1. C

      Hi Darcy, thanks for reaching out with your question about screen savers.

      You might find this discussion about adding a mouse jiggler to be useful. It contains a simple script that you can run on your TinyPilot device that will move the mouse every few seconds. The thread contains instructions on how to download and set up the script, but if you have any questions please let me know.

      1. SScott MacDonald @scottmac
          2023-04-13 17:39:26.781Z

          Fantastic, that will do what I need, ty!

          It makes me wonder though, is it also possible to use a similar approach to send keystrokes directly to the device, in the same way?

          1. Thanks for the quick response, I'm pleased to hear that this might be a good solution for you.

            It is possible to send keypresses using a similar technique, although I'd advise against it based on personal experience. This is because mouse movement is generally a passive input, whereas sending keypresses is much more likely to result in unexpected behaviour. For example, sending the "Command" key every few seconds might keep the system awake, but it also means that if someone presses "Q" on any available keyboard the active application would quit unexpectedly.