Change raspberry pi sleep time

Question

I recently bought the 7" touchscreen for my raspberry pi B 3 running Raspbian and and wanting to use it as a wall mounted display for a smart home project. However I would like the touchscreen to "sleep" or turn off sooner than the time that it's set at now (I think 30 mins but I am not sure.) If there is a way to shorten that time and also retain the ability to "wake" the screen when touched would be amazing.

The second question would be, is there a way programmatically to "wake" the display? For example, if a notification shows up the screen would wake to show that.

Answer 1

The commands to directly turn OFF and ON the screen are.

OFF

echo 1 > /sys/class/backlight/rpi_backlight/bl_power

ON

echo 0 > /sys/class/backlight/rpi_backlight/bl_power

You might need to run these with sudo e.g.

sudo bash -c "echo 1 > /sys/class/backlight/rpi_backlight/bl_power"
sudo bash -c "echo 0 > /sys/class/backlight/rpi_backlight/bl_power"