It’s interesting to note that turning off the power saving features for the common Wifi dongle chipsets used on Raspbian seems to fix not only the pauses where before it would sleep during inactivity, but also it seems to fix/improve the laggy responsiveness even when typing commands over SSH to a Pi. Links to the settings in my previous post here.
Changing the brightness on the Raspberry Pi 7″ touchscreen (v1.1)
Per discussion here, if you have a v1.1 version of the Raspberry Pi 7″ touchscreen, you can vary the brightness by setting a value of 1 to 255 into the file /sys/class/backlight/rpi-backlight/brightness
Use sudo to echo values to a file, do:
sudo sh -c "echo 80 > /sys/class/backlight/rpi_backlight/brightness"
Fixing unresponsive touch on PiTFT with PyGame
I have a 2.8 PiTFT which I’ve used on my Pi 1 and just set it up on a Pi 2. I tried to get Adafruit’s FreqShow working with the screen, and it would display, but was unresponsive to any touch inputs. I know touch was working in X Windows otherwise, and had ran through all the calibration tools in the PiTFT setup instructions, so something else was wrong.
Some Googling later, turns out the PiTFT and PyGame (used by FreqShow) works ok on Raspbian Wheezy (which I have on my Pi 1), but not on Jessie (which I have on my Pi 2).
Trick is to replace libsdl with the prior/older version from Jessie – a script to do the replacement is in the post linked about. Ran the script, and now FreqShow works on the PiTFT 2.8 great. Shame there’s no audio out as well, but a cool use for the small screen.
Fixing wifi dropouts on Raspbian / Raspberry Pi
From this article, if you’re using one of the Wifi dongles on a Pi 1 or 2 (Pi3 has built in wifi), you can prevent the random dropouts during periods of inactivity by:
sudo nano /etc/modprobe.d/8192cu.conf
and then paste in and save this:
options 8192cu rtw_power_mgnt=0 rtw_enusbss=1 rtw_ips_mode=1
and then reboot.