Display & power
Brightness, display size, screensaver, idle sequences with standby and shutdown, night times, LED lighting and standby on the power button.
Under Box → Display & power you set how bright the display is, what happens when the box is idle and how the power button behaves.
Brightness and display size
- Normal brightness: 1–100 %. How finely the brightness can be set depends on the display (see Display & touch).
- Display size: small, normal or large. Enlarges text and touch areas on the kids' interface; "normal" is meant for 5- to 7-inch displays.
Inactivity
There are two separate sequences with up to five stages each. Every stage starts a set time after the previous one; the first counts from the last interaction. A touch, a button, an RFID card or a command from the app resets everything.
| Sequence | Allowed stages | Meant for |
|---|---|---|
| While music plays | dim, screensaver, display off | saving the display while music keeps playing. The box never switches off. |
| When nothing plays | also standby and switch off | saving power when the box was forgotten. |
"When nothing plays" counts from the last interaction or the end of playback – whichever was later. Everything that plays counts as playback: local media, Spotify and Music Assistant. Paused music counts as "nothing plays".
Each stage must go "deeper" than the one before (dim → screensaver → display off → standby → switch off). An example for "When nothing plays":
- after 5 minutes screensaver
- after another 5 minutes display off
- after another 50 minutes standby
- after another 2 hours switch off
Before standby and switch off, the box checks again that really nothing plays. A standby from this sequence also wakes on a touch of the display (a standby from the button only on the button). If "switch off" follows the standby, the box switches off from standby after the set time.
Idle brightness applies to the "dim" and "screensaver" stages.
Screensaver
A retro pixel worm crawling across the display. Colour mode (rainbow, neon, theme, single colour), background, pixel size, worm length, base speed and random turbo bursts can be set. A touch ends it immediately; that touch does not trigger anything on the interface underneath.
Timed brightness (night)
With night brightness the display is dimmed in set time windows, e.g. Mon–Fri 19:30–07:00. Several windows are possible, also across midnight.
Button and LED lighting
Controls lit buttons and the power LED (see Buttons). PWM-capable pins dim smoothly, others only switch on or off.
- Follow the display idle: when idle the LED switches to the idle brightness.
- Also use night time: the idle brightness also applies in the night windows.
Standby (quick start)
With "Power button puts the box into standby" a short press does not shut the box down but sends it into a standby from which it is back in about one second.
In standby:
- playback is paused,
- the display goes dark and touch is ignored (touches do not pile up),
- the interface is frozen (no CPU load),
- CPU and Wi-Fi run in power-saving mode, the Pi's LEDs are off,
- the button LED glows with the configured standby brightness.
Another short press wakes the box.
Display and standby
Whether the display really turns black in standby depends on the hardware:
| Display | Behaviour in standby |
|---|---|
| Official Raspberry Pi touch display | backlight switches off completely. |
| Displays with Linux backlight control | backlight switches off or to its minimum. |
| Waveshare 5″ DSI (newer revisions) | can only be dimmed; the minimum stays visible in a dark room. Fully off only with a hardware mod according to Waveshare (resistor 100 kΩ → 68 kΩ). |
| Displays without backlight control (many HDMI displays) | the interface shows a black picture, the backlight stays on. |
Before freezing, the box always shows a black picture so that no still image stays on screen.
Requirement: a power button
Standby needs a button that the kernel reports as a power button (overlay gpio-shutdown). With a MuPiHAT it is set up automatically (BCM 17). Without a MuPiHAT see the GPIO reference. If no button is found, the page shows a notice.
Long press and battery
- Hold the button for 3 seconds to switch off: shuts the box down cleanly. This option only exists without a MuPiHAT. With a MuPiHAT (or any other loaded power cut circuit) its own long-press cut-off switches off.
- Still switch off in standby below … % battery: with a MuPiHAT on battery, a box in standby shuts down quietly at this threshold (default 20 %, never below the regular protective shutdown).
Power button diagnostics
"Check button" shows what the running kernel has really loaded: the button (with its GPIO), a power cut circuit, the matching lines of config.txt (also outside the MuPiBox block or under sections like [pi4]), whether systemd-logind still handles the button itself, other programs reading the button or GPIOs, and the latest button events. If the entry "backend stopped" is missing before a start, the power was cut without a shutdown.