Hi there, I now have reliable control of the LCD and idle (deep sleep) mode
Secret is NOT to try direct control of the LCD
Instead, let the cam's 'Display Off' switch cam into low power mode and use 'click "shoot_half", sleep 500' to wakeup the cam. This has proved very reliable, as opposed to the method I wrote about above. Also has the advantage of leaving the green LED on, which is good on a590 as there's no LED control yet.
Click half shoot is the only button that has no side effect, with the downside of requiring some delay after it so the cam completes waking up before script issues more button clicks to get cam into desired mode.
For MF mode long interval timelapse my script now successfully gets the cam back into MF mode after waking from 'deep sleep', this is good, no? What I wanted anyway. For normal and macro mode the script also allows for prefocus + AFlock, or refocus each wakeup. Focus mode is set in @params so does not require user to carefully set cam prior to starting the timelapse sequence.
Testers with DigicII as well as DigicIII/IV wanted so I can get the script working with both property sets.
Daylapse script is on
http://bugsplatter.id.au/chdk/ and the documentation there is almost up-to-date.