Hi all. I'm running a macro process overnight to do some batch exports that includes the "Pause Until Conditions are Met: The screen contains [image]". macro. As I'm running this overnight though, I would like to put my Mac displays to sleep (control + shift + eject). However, when doing this, I discovered the macro seems to fail and cannot detect the image.
I unfortunately have Thunderbolt displays that don't have an on/off switch on their display. The brightness can be adjusted, but they can't go to absolute black.
Monitors being digital, their brightness is (obviously) set by software, not hardware. The OS usually includes software that lets you change the brightness of monitors, but it may have a minimum threshold that it won't drop below. So maybe third party apps might have a different minimum. I tried googling your problem and found software that claims to set the brightness of external monitors.
I won't normally download software that I can't verify is safe, so I can't help you with determining trust.
Such software may have a different minimum brightness that you can set.
But yes, KM probably can't find images if the video card/GPU thinks that the monitor is off. I could be wrong on that, but the GPU probably doesn't bother rendering anything if the monitor is off, therefore resulting in the APIs that KM calls to get screen data to fail.
There's only a 10% chance that this will solve your problem, but if it takes only a few minutes to check, maybe it's worth checking.
And can be re-awakened via a terminal command, I would only use this if you have a KM macro to restore brightness via a keyboard shortcut or perhaps using an 'IDLE()' trigger.
UPDATE: The more I play with this app, the more of a god-send I think it is! It also controls volume at a very customizable / granular level. Hotkeys galore, etc... I'm very impressed
Great find! Circling back to the initial question then: Does using this app work around the issue of KM screen capturing not working with displays put to sleep?
It absolutely should, you're just adjusting screen brightness... The OS still thinks it's on.
There might be unintended side-effects.. you also need to make sure your screen doesn't 'lock' after a certain amount of inactivity, screensaver doesn't kick in. and that you have a way to 'escape' the 'dark mode'.
I have some macros using found images which run at night with the lowest brightness level on my iMac and my Apple Cinema Display which is my secondary Monitor. They don’t even need to have lightmode enabled though …
I think the hardest thing is to set this up … but it is totally possible …
You have to put a lot of work into it and drink a huge amount on coffee staying awake while doing this but it’s totally worth it.
