Preventing Sleep Mode in a Display-Only Ignition Project

Ignition
1

A customer is running an Ignition Perspective project that includes a dashboard component displayed on a TV for real-time factory monitoring. The project is strictly for visual use, with no user interaction or input devices connected. However, company IT policies enforce a sleep mode on the local machine after 5 minutes of inactivity, which disrupts the display.

Is there a way within Ignition to programmatically trigger a system call that simulates keyboard or mouse activity to keep the machine awake? Ideally, this would be handled within Perspective.

2

Get a mouse jiggler dongle on Amazon. Plugs into a USB port and emulates a mouse with tiny movements that still allows you to use a mouse regularly, but keeps the PC awake.

5 Likes
3

lol, that was going to be my suggestion too.

1 Like
4

Y'all are too nice. The right answer is to fix ridiculous IT policies. (Or avoid them...)

2 Likes
5

Relevant video?

6

That's the problem with some IT groups is they globally enforce policies that may be necessary for certain groups on everyone. But even if they didn't, they still get out of hand at times. My wife is an attorney and deals with big banks and credit card companies, and one law firm she worked for did a similar thing. She had to go through about 2-3 multifactor logins to remote into their systems from home, then if she left it idle to even just use the restroom, it would log her off and she'd have to do it all over again. Bought her a mouse jiggler and it solved her problem. Luckily IT didn't catch on even when she left it on all night a few times.

7

I think I used a Windows VB Script something like this in the past:

' 'no-sleep.vbs       (Note 1.)
set wsc = CreateObject("WScript.Shell")
Do
    WScript.Sleep(60 * 1000)    ' Every minute.
    wsc.SendKeys("{F13}")
Loop

As far as I remember the F13 key exists in the OS but seldom, if ever, on the physical keyboard so it's very unlikely to cause a problem.

Save somewhere on the storage as nosleep.vbs and run it. If it works then you just need to see if you can have it autostart on boot up.

1 The double apostrophe on the first line is to prevent the markdown conversion treating the line as a VB string.

2 Likes
8

You can try PowerToys Awake utility if you're on Windows.