Windows 10 sleep/hibernate affecting actions?

[steelcitysi]

Hello,

I have a long running script that will perform some mouse/keyboard actions once every hour or so, basically clicking some buttons in a Windows application to upload some data. I noticed that it will work when I am at my computer observing, but it does not seem to work when the script is left running overnight and I am away. All other aspects of the R script work, but it is almost as if the mouse/keyboard section of the script was never executed because I will check after many hours have gone by and it seems fine, with the exception of the mouse/keyboard actions allegedly not executing.

I have put in a number of Sys.sleep() functions before/after mouse and keyboard actions to ensure the script is not executing moves too fast for the OS, but I continue to observe the same behaviour of working when I am there but seemingly skipped when I am away for long periods of time. I am wondering if there is a known affect on KeyboardSimulator if Windows goes into some kind of sleep/hibernate mode? Will the first action potentially be lost, and do I need to "wake up" the OS somehow first to reliably get mouse/keyboard actions to register with the OS?

Any other tips or thoughts about this issue would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

[ChiHangChen]

Thanks for reporting this to us

Have you tried turn off the Windows sleep/hibernate mode and run your scripts for long hours?

Also, may I ask what kind of work you are using with KeyboardSimulator? Not sure the issue comes from KeyboardSimulator itself or the application that KeyboardSimulator inyeract with while Windows go into sleep/hibernate mode.

Thanks!

[steelcitysi]

I verified this problem on another computer. It seems like KeyboardSimulator's connection to the Windows API expires after some time. On two computers, if I run this script and walk away, it will show that the script ran (i.e. printouts show in terminal) but there will be no Notepad open with something written into it.

library(KeyboardSimulator)

Sys.sleep(60*60) # do nothing for an hour

print("script started")
Sys.sleep(5)
keybd.press('Win')
Sys.sleep(5)
keybd.type_string("Notepad")
Sys.sleep(1)
keybd.press('Enter')
Sys.sleep(5)
keybd.type_string("writing something into Notepad")
print("script finished")

[steelcitysi]

Hello, I did a little bit more digging. It seems like in order for the KeyboardSimulator inputs to register, there needs to be somekind of call to SetThreadExecutionState beforehand to reset Windows idle timer:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/winbase/nf-winbase-setthreadexecutionstate#remarks

Any thoughts?