How to get Acer T232HL Touch Screen to wake from power saving via touch?

duncsimpson

Hi,

I have the Acer T232HL touch screen connected via HDMI and USB3 to a Windows 10 desktop as the primary monitor, with no physical keyboard or mouse.  Windows 10 is power settings are configured to never put the PC to sleep, but put the display to sleep after 10 minutes.  All the touch functions work fine, except that when Windows 10 puts the display to sleep after 10 minutes.  The T232HL goes into power saving mode and touching the display to wake up the display doesn't work.  I would have expected the touch feature to stay active via the USB3 connection while the display itself is in power saving mode, thus touching the screen during power saving should cause Windows 10 to wake the monitor as if I had clicked the physical mouse or tapped a key on a physical keyboard.

The only way to wake it is to press the physical power button on the T232HL to turn it off, and then press the power button again to turn it on, and then tap on the touch screen so that Windows 10 wakes the screen up.

Ideally I want to be able to simply tap the touch screen to wake it up.

Is there a way to configure Windows 10 or a setting on the T232HL to get this scenario to work?

My 2 workarounds are as follows.
1. plug physical mouse in and use that only for waking the display, however I'm trying to setup a system where this isn't required if possible.
2. set Windows 10 to never put display to sleep, and configure the Windows 10 screen saver to Blank after 10 minutes.  However this means the display is on 24/7 and consuming power the whole time.  At night the screen glows in the dark because it isn't actually off when displaying the blank screen.

Thanks,
Duncan

duncsimpson

billsey said:

With the touch screen connected, take a look in Device Manager to see if the USB port, or the touch screen driver itself, has an option to disable sleep for the device. That would potentially allow the display to turn off while the touch screen stays active.

Thanks for the suggestion. 

I've done that, ie changed the Power Management for the USB port to untick "Allow the computer to turn off this device to save power", and I've also checked the upstream devices, and they already had that option unticked.  However the behaviour is no different unfortunately.

I suspect that when the Acer monitor goes into power saving mode it also puts the USB devices within the monitor, including the touch input device, into power saving mode, ie they get disconnected from Windows 10.  The reason I thought that was when I power the monitor off with the power button, and then back on again, or if I have a physical mouse connected and click the button to wake the monitor, I get the Windows sound that it has discovered a new device.  I can also see each time I wake the monitor, there is a new event in the Windows 10 event viewer "Touch/Touchpad Hardware Quality Assurance verification succeeded." 

I figured if this was the case, Acer would need to implement something in the monitor itself, ie to leave the USB feature powered on while in power saving mode.  I've had a good look through the monitor's OSD menu and I found a setting "Power-off USB charge", which was disabled by default.  Enabling this feature has fixed it!  The monitor now wakes on touch, and Windows 10 no longer makes the noise that it has found a new device, and there is no longer the event  "Touch/Touchpad Hardware Quality Assurance verification succeeded."  each time, in other words the touch device stays active whilst the display itself is in power saving (power light goes amber and display goes properly dark).

If anyone else is reading this, I have left the Power Management changes listed above in place as well, so it may be that both things need to be changed to get the monitor to behave this way.