Configuring Screen Sleep

Question: 

Can I configure my monitors and/or content to switch off overnight and then on again in the morning?  Or allow content to play during certain times, e.g. when the area is open to clients.

Resolution:

Yes.  You are able to do this but first you should check on the hardware settings of the PC to see how the displays handle the Sending to Sleep Signal in the Bios.

We would also recommend setting the Power Management of the Player PC to set the HDD to sleep after approximately 30 minutes. This may add to the life of the unit and also lower power consumption.

To configure Screen Sleep, firstly we are going to be editing and adding scripts to our project so when the desired project is highlighted then choose scripts on the menu.

1. Locate required project in the Project Selector and open.

2. From here we are going to be setting up a Master Schedule playlist which contains 3 sub-playlists, content and screen sleep.  We will only deal with how to configure these 3 playlists in this article.  To understand Playlists and their creation and editing refer to the main Acquire Manual.

Here we have a main master playlist which has our content and another which is just the screen sleep page configured.

3. Now double-click the main content script, in this case 1 to open the Playlist Line Editor.  To edit the timings, click Schedule. 

4. You can now edit when the playlist is allowed and not allowed to play, in this case we have specified that the content is to be played between the hours of 0700 - 2100 on Mon - Fri, which may correspond to trading hours for a business.  

5. Repeat this process for screensleep_1, although in the editing of this script we configure and select the screen sleep to only be allowed during the night hours between 2100 - 0700.

Please note: The settings in the scheduled playlist overrule those day or time settings in those of the sub-playlists.

We would recommend placing the Screen Sleep ACQ on a black page (even if the screen does not actually switch off due to hardware compatibility you will still get a black screen) and setting the config to Wake up when the page quits. Set the page length to specific 30 minutes (1800 seconds). This will allow the page to play and not keep hammering Acquire to try and play.

You can either create a manual playlist to do this or if you want to specify slightly different settings then use the scheduler and simply add the lines in the same fashion.