Why not just disable the standby then?

All that standby does, is turn off the VFD
(and stop playing if in a playlist).

That's about it, really.

But if you want to detect it from userspace,
look at /proc/empeg_power, at the "Display on" line.

If 1, then NOT in standby. If 0, then YES in standby.

Inside the kernel, The "struct display_dev" structure has a "power" bool: 0==standby, 1==not_standby. This is the same variable that is exposed in /proc/empeg_power:Display-on.

Hijack uses it ("dev->power") in several places inside hijack.c

Cheers