Raspberry Pi 4 - Screen Blanking manually via command line 2023

This is how to disable screen blanking on Raspberry Pi in 2023. This would go in a crontab or can be manually run via the command line. I wanted my rpi screen to power off at night, then be on all day. Most guides seemed confusing, and raspi-config didn't seem to actually do screen blanking for some reason. This was my solution.

• Tested on Raspberry Pi 4 (Jan 18, 2023)

Enable screen blanking on rpi4 so screen will automatically sleep after a while

export DISPLAY=:0; xset +dpms; xset s blank; xset s off; xset dpms force on

Disable screen blanking on rpi 4 so screen is always on

export DISPLAY=:0;xset s noblank; xset s off; xset -dpms

Description of xset screen blanking commands on raspberry pi

• xset s noblank
  • Sets the screen to not blank
• xset s off
  • Sets the screensaver off (if applicable)
• xset -dpms
  • Turns off Display Power Management (dpms won't trigger the screen to sleep)
• xset +dpms
  • This forces Display Power Management to kick in and sleep the monitor after a while
• xset dpms force on
  • (not sure) I think this is +dpms but also forces the monitor to turn on.

Auto start

This command does not persist reboots. To run on every boot, create a script and add it to your startup items in your GUI. Or add to crontab -e on startup. Or make a systemd startup script. rc.local may even work if you're lazy.

Troubleshooting

Allow 15 minutes with each setting to see if the screen goes/doesn't go blank in the way you want. There may be other things that blank your screen, like system settings in MATE or other DE's, so look there too.

• Disable screen blanking in raspi-config
• Disable screensaver app, and in settings uncheck DPMS
• Check system settings (MATE or Lubuntu power settings etc)
• export DISPLAY=:0 is only needed if you run it via crontab or SSH.

External Links

Screen Blanking - this helped me a ton

Disable screen blanking - includes with auto-start