[wagonman76]

Well I think I got my display all figured out. I found that if I disconnect the ground wire from the display, it will still run fine but it kills the backlight. It pulses just a little with the blinking light on the Arduino board but its not a big deal . So put the wire normally to pin 15 of the display to an NPN transistor that breaks the ground to the display. The different levels of brightness now work too.

I was kinda hoping I could kill the display entirely, but if I do that, it shows jibberish when it comes back on unless it is reset. So anyway, I think I got it working as intended. It does time out properly now and hopefully the killing of the backlight will make the screen less hot when not in use.

The display I used was from ebay, item# 320277596129. They say yellow-green backlight with black characters. It is actually a green backlight with blue characters, which still looks nice and is easy on the eyes. It looks just like the display on the old Casio graphing calculators.