Wacom Touchscreen in ThinkPad goes into sleep mode after 5 minutes, difficult to wake up

Tobi K

• 2025年10月07日 21:54
• 已编辑于

It's a Thinkpad x13 yoga g4, but this issue has been reported for other Lenovo devices as well. Here is a reddit post with various people that have this problem: https://www.reddit.com/r/Lenovo/comments/170gnz8/touchscreen_unresponsive_after_inactivity/

The touchscreen can at times be rather stubborn to be woken up, requiring quite some force to be applied. This can be reproduced in the bios, so this is not a linux or windows bug.

I don't think Lenovo really knows what's going on here, indicated by their past attempts to fix this by replacing the touchscreens (mine and of those in the reddit posts), until they just refund people.

It is a wacom device, as can be seen in /proc/bus/input/devices:

I: Bus=0018 Vendor=056a Product=534e Version=0100
N: Name="Wacom HID 534E Pen"
P: Phys=i2c-WACF2200:00
S: Sysfs=/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:15.1/i2c_designware.1/i2c-1/i2c-WACF2200:00/0018:056A:534E.0002/input/input17
U: Uniq=
H: Handlers=mouse3 event7 
B: PROP=2
B: EV=1b
B: KEY=1c03 0 0 0 0 0
B: ABS=1000d000003
B: MSC=21

I: Bus=0018 Vendor=056a Product=534e Version=0100
N: Name="Wacom HID 534E Finger"
P: Phys=i2c-WACF2200:00
S: Sysfs=/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:15.1/i2c_designware.1/i2c-1/i2c-WACF2200:00/0018:056A:534E.0002/input/input18
U: Uniq=
H: Handlers=mouse4 event8 
B: PROP=2
B: EV=1b
B: KEY=400 0 0 0 0 0
B: ABS=260800000000003
B: MSC=20

I already disabled linux power management for every device on my laptop via a script, but this doesn't do anything. I also used an alternative linux driver: https://github.com/linuxwacom/input-wacom, to no avail.

This isn't a satisfying solution, but it does somewhat work: `echo "i2c-WACF2200:00" | sudo tee /sys/bus/i2c/drivers/i2c_hid_acpi/unbind && echo "i2c-WACF2200:00" | sudo tee /sys/bus/i2c/drivers/i2c_hid_acpi/bind` resets the touchscreen and makes it work again. But this causes a delay of 1-2 seconds until it can be used again. Automating this could be done easily by polling /sys/bus/i2c/devices/i2c-WACF2200:00/power/wakeup_last_time_ms or something, but I need the touchscreen to be ready at all times, this is too risky for my purpose.

Kernel 6.14.0-32-generic, Ubuntu 25.04.

I don't know, maybe I should create a ticket instead of posting to the community, but I can still do that if I'm not getting any feedback here. I guess at this point this issue needs a wacom engineer to write some insightful comments.

• Is there any command I could periodically write via i2c to the touchscreen to keep it awake? If something like this exists, I'm open to making and publishing some easily-installable solution (systemd service with .deb packaging, possibly using python and smbus or something) on github.
• Can the controllers firmware somehow be updated with a fix, in case this is a bug and not some annoying energy-saving feature?
• In case this is an energy-saving feature, could you instead rely on the kernels power management instead of implementing it on your own? (I don't actually know how that works, just an idea)
• Anything else that comes to your mind?

0

• 

  João

  • 2025年10月08日 11:30

  Hi Tobi K, 

  Although this is Wacom's sensors and drivers, here we cannot really help that much further since the integration of these components with the whole system is created by Lenovo. We wouldn't know more than they already do. 

  If Lenovo is handling this as a defect and replacing units, I would carefully assume they understand the issue is documented and that they already discussed this with the right people in our components side of the business. 

  0
• 

  Tobi K

  • 2025年12月13日 16:52
  • 已编辑于

  Thanks for your response.

  If Lenovo is handling this as a defect and replacing units, I would carefully assume they understand the issue is documented and that they already discussed this with the right people in our components side of the business. 

  I doubt it. Replacing screens for something that always happens after exactly 5 minutes, with the new screens doing exactly the same thing, sounds like some intentional feature, and lots of miscommunication somewhere internally at lenovo. The behavior of the touchscreen is imho a feature, just a very, very bad one.

  Could you please forward this to the right people at least? Do you have some contact at lenovo? I'm afraid I'll just be running in circles with ai-generated responses in the lenovo forum. And creating service tickets just means I'll end up with another replaced screen that does exactly the same thing...

  0
• 

  João

  • 2025年12月15日 16:27

  Hi Tobi K,

  Sorry to read that.  

  That is an entirely separate side of the business. We usually don't have direct contact but I'll see what we can do from our side. I cannot make any promises though. 

  0
• 

  Tobi K

  • 2025年12月15日 16:43

  Thanks. Fingers crossed. Where this gets really problematic, even if it wakes up fast for once, is when I use the touchscreen for live music performances and it doesn't react after playing on a hardware instrument for some time. This is extremely inconvenient and has the potential to ruin everything. This should at least be configurable in the bios if they insist on keeping this feature/bug.

  0

Please sign in to leave a comment.