Installation

This section covers the installation of the library on the Raspberry Pi.

Requirements

  • A Raspberry Pi including a correctly assembled 7” touch display v1.1 or higher (look on the display’s circuit board to see its version) running a Linux-based OS. Alternatively you can use rpi-backlight-emulator on all operating systems and without the actual hardware.
  • Python 3.6+
  • Optional: pygobject for the GUI, already installed on a recent Raspbian

Installation

Note

This library will not work with Windows IoT, you’ll need a Linux distribution running on your Raspberry Pi. This was tested with Raspbian 9 (Stretch) and 10 (Buster).

rpi-backlight is available on PyPI, so you can install it using pip3:

$ pip3 install rpi_backlight

Note: Create this udev rule to update permissions, otherwise you’ll have to run Python code, the GUI and CLI as root when changing the power or brightness:

$ echo 'SUBSYSTEM=="backlight",RUN+="/bin/chmod 666 /sys/class/backlight/%k/brightness /sys/class/backlight/%k/bl_power"' | sudo tee -a /etc/udev/rules.d/backlight-permissions.rules

rpi-backlight is now installed. See Usage to get started!