Lockscreen for Emulation Station

jakejm79 · 2 Dec 2018, 17:21

So I just finished up my arcade cabinet and after tweaking all the things and getting it all set up I just have one issue left to over come.

Skip ahead to avoid the back story:
The way the cabinet is set up is power is via a power strip that is split so 2 sockets have constant power the other 3 are switched via the original switch on top of the cabinet. That switch effectively powers the CCFL for the marquee, amp for the speakers and the monitor. The Pi and USB controllers boards for the sticks/buttons stay on constantly.
This allows me to kill the screen, speakers and marquee with the flick of a switch and not have to worry about shutting down the Pi. One problem I have is that people can't seem to resist just hammering on the buttons when they walk by when the screen is off (I assume they think everything is off so they aren't doing any harm, but really the Pi is up and running). I had toyed with the idea of running the controller boards through a powered USB hub that would shut off (and hopefully kill the USB connection) when the Marquee, screen, amp switch was thrown. But I'm not a big fan of the idea of what would equate to constantly unplugging and plugging in USB devices into the Pi plus most of the cheap USB powered hubs are suspect. So this brings me to another idea:

Is there a way to have like a lockscreen/screensaver for emulation station, i.e. if after 5 mins of inactivity in ES the screen dims and you have to hit a certain button combo to get back in. I have kiosk mode setup, run command popup disabled and the retropie menu entry disabled, so I don't think there is a lot of damage that can be done by blindly hitting buttons, but it still would be nice to protect against anything especially when I'm not around.

mitu · 2 Dec 2018, 17:46

What are you using your arcade cabinet for ?

jakejm79 · 2 Dec 2018, 19:20

As in which systems? 2600, MS, MD, NES, SNES, PSX and a selection of Arcade games. Or like what sort of situations? It just sits in what was a second living room but will become a bar area, problem is its in the corner of the room next to the large entrance way, so people walk by it often and I guess people just can't resist reaching and tapping buttons. While I could move it, the room layout doesn't really allow and its not just walk by traffic, sometimes the kids will not know it has to be powered on via the switch to work so will just start hammering on the buttons to try and 'wake' it up - that's fine if I am around, I can let them know how to turn it on, but I'm not always right there.

mitu · 2 Dec 2018, 19:25

No, I mean is it in a public place if people just come around and slap the buttons ?

jakejm79 · 2 Dec 2018, 19:27

@mitu
Just edited it, but basically its in my house, but I have kids, that have friends over often and our house is also the entertaining house during the holidays, so we have lots of people that stop by, etc. I know the easy answer is just to stop people from doing it, but that's not always practical.

mitu · 2 Dec 2018, 19:29

Emulationstation has an option to enable a power saving mode, with a timeout after which this is active. Pressing a button will disable the power saving and only the subsequent button presses do anything in the interface.

jakejm79 · 2 Dec 2018, 19:36

@mitu
Thanks, I'll check that out, currently I have the dim screensaver set, so despite the screen not being on it still takes one button press to wake it and doesn't respond till extra buttons are pressed, was just hoping there would be away that it had to be something like press A+B+X+Y to exit the screensaver vs. just any button.

I'd also accept if I could power off the screen has a screensaver, that way the screen would come on with the first button press and people then wouldn't continue to press things since the screen would now be on. But despite editing the config.txt file and playing around with HDMI blanking the screen never powers off.

Piercery · 15 Mar 2020, 22:09

@jakejm79 Did you ever figure this out? I was thinking it would be awesome to use the same idea to unlock the console with key inputs to be able to use a coin dispensor. But am not finding anyway to do what you were requesting either.