Yes you can do a timer for turning off the backlight, but in my case I have it in a room with a proximity sensor so have set it so the screen turns off when I’m not in in the room.
There’s good documentation for backlight control and screen saving methods in the docs site, under LVGL.
I wrote a modular package for small ESP-32 screens. The OP linked to it in the original post. The default setup for me is to keep the screen on all the time during the day at 100% brightness, dim to 50% at sunset and go off at midnight. It you touch the screen after midnight it will come back on for 10 minutes. This seems to work very well.
There’s a function where it will make screen look like static, to avoid burn in (that will apparently happen regardless of if the backlight is on or not), so dimming the screen might not be the best idea (but maybe a timer to dim and then turn off, in order for the static to be shown and increase the screen longevity).
but in case it disappears (seems to be the case on aliexpress), search for either waveshare 7" or ESP32-S3 7 Inch 800x480 LX7, you want the ones with the large black bezels (obviously!)
I’m interested in this because I want to do something using ESPHome and a display, so I ordered one of these. It boots up and I see sample pages and can verify the touchscreen works.
However, I can’t connect to it with a USB connection to install ESPHome. I’m using a Mac, which has some extra security issues that I hear Windows and Linux don’t have. I’m using this page on the ESPHome site to try to do a first install. I found when I plugged my USB cable into the port labelled USB, my computer does not see the device. When I plug my USB cable into the UART1 port, I see USB Single Serial (cu.usbmodem58960348321) - Paired as a serial port option and I pick that to connect to. The web page says it’s connected, but when I try to do the actual install, I get this:
I’ve tried variations of holding down the BOOT and RESET buttons, but I always get the same message.
What did you do to get ESPHome on this for the first time?
Thanks - easy driver install. When the web page said it was connected, I figured it was communicating, so I didn’t even think about needing drivers.
A few notes for others trying this:
When I first tried to set this up, even after installing the driver, it was working when I plugged my USB-C cable into the UART1 socket. I used the web installer at the link I gave in my post above and it installed. It could not setup my wifi. I waited and tried it again, still no joy. I changed the USB-C fable from UART1 to USB and give it a minute or so. Still no luck with wifi, but after waiting another minute or two, I found I was able to set it up.
From there, I was able to do communicate normally with it.
