Android Things: Raspberry Pi screen timeout

Question

I'm building app on Raspberry Pi with Android Things and I have 7 inch touch screen, but the screen never turns off.

Is it possible to set timeout like in Android phones? or force it to turn off/on.

If I remove the power line and inserted again the screen, it will not work until I reboot.

Answer 1

There are two system settings that control this process: STAY_ON_WHILE_PLUGGED_IN and SCREEN_OFF_TIMEOUT

The STAY_ON_WHILE_PLUGGED_IN setting is set to BATTERY_PLUGGED_AC by default. You can programmatically change this value in your application code with the Settings API:

Settings.Global.putInt(getContentResolver(),
        Settings.Global.STAY_ON_WHILE_PLUGGED_IN, 0);

You can also make this change from the command line if it is more convenient:

$ adb shell settings put global stay_on_while_plugged_in 0

Answer 2

The approach below works starting with Android Things Developer Preview 5.0. For older releases it has no effect.

Turn off display:

adb shell settings put global stay_on_while_plugged_in 0

Turn on display:

adb shell settings put global stay_on_while_plugged_in 1
adb shell input keyevent 26

For a programmatic solution see @Devunwired's answer.