rpi-backlight 1.5.0

A Python module for controlling power and brightness of the official Raspberry Pi 7" touch display.

A Python module for controlling power and brightness of the official Raspberry Pi 7” touch display.

Features

• Change the display brightness smoothly or abrupt

• Set the display power on or off

• Get the current brightness

• Get the maximum brightness

• Get the display power state (on/off)

• Command line interface

• Graphical user interface

Requirements

• A Raspberry Pi including a correctly assembled 7” touch display v1.1 or higher running a Linux-based OS

• Python 2 or 3

• Optional: pygobject for the GUI, is likely to be already installed on a recent Raspbian

Installation

• Install from PyPI using:

  pip install rpi_backlight

• or clone this repository and install by:

  sudo python setup.py install

Note: You may need to edit the backlight rules file in order to run the code:

sudo nano /etc/udev/rules.d/backlight-permissions.rules

Insert the line:

SUBSYSTEM=="backlight",RUN+="/bin/chmod 666 /sys/class/backlight/%k/brightness /sys/class/backlight/%k/bl_power"

Usage

API

Example in a Python shell:

>>> import rpi_backlight as bl
>>> bl.set_brightness(20)
>>> bl.set_brightness(255)
>>> bl.set_brightness(20, smooth=False)
>>> bl.get_max_brightness()
255
>>> bl.get_current_brightness()
20
>>> bl.get_power()
True
>>> bl.set_power(False)

NOTE: Code using set_ functions of this library has to be run as root, e.g. sudo python file.py !

CLI

Open a terminal and run rpi-backlight as root.

GUI

Open a terminal and run rpi-backlight-gui as root.

Todo

• Allow to set the brightness fading duration in set_brightness(value)

• (Create a really simple GUI in pygobject to change the display brightness, maybe just a scale/slider)

  • Most of it done, but not tested across several Python versions and distros

  • Ensure it runs on the Pi under both Python 2 and 3

I would be happy if you can help shortening this todo-list!

External Links

• Travis CI: Build tests

• Landscape.io: Code health tests

• readthedocs.org: Documentation

License

The source code and all other files in this repository are licensed under the MIT license, so you can easily use it in your own projects.