Looking for a battery bar for the [deck]
(midwest.social)
Steam HardwareA couple of times I have been playing something and was so deep in the game I didn't realize the battery was going down faster than I realized and the deck decided to turn off.
I have been thinking it would be nice for me to have the battery level visible even when running a game in full screen mode. I have an app on my phone with permission to display on top of other apps that draws a line around the camera cut out showing the battery charge level no matter what I am doing on the phone. In some older phone with no cutout I used to have a horizontal line in the top of the screen.
I would love to have this on the deck. Does anyone know if it exists? I've been searching with no result. If it doesn't exist, I wonder how difficult it would be to implement it... I have no clue how to have it display on top of everything though.
The image shows one of the old apps I used to have to do this on my phone.
Two plugins you may want to consider:
AutoSuspend - you can set the deck to automatically go to sleep at 5% or another threshold, to prevent the deck from dying while playing. I believe you can configure additional low battery alerts in it as well.
MangoPEEL - The deck uses MangoHUD for the in-game performance monitor. You can use MangoPEEL to customize those monitors, so you can change one of the the deck's monitor labels to just show battery percentage, battery percentage + remaining minutes of battery life, or something similar. I can't remember if an actual battery bar is possible, but it's probably not.
Auto Suspend
So what happens? The screen just goes black in the middle of a game? I guess that would be a clue to plug it in, if you're expecting it.
Right now, having it shut down when you didn't realize the battery was low is really annoying.
But here's something I've done many times. I pick up my Deck, I turn it on without thinking, and it turns out it's at 0% (or very close to it), and—as the screen comes on and the CPU wakes up—the voltage has suddenly dropped below the low-voltage shut off, so it shuts down immediately. Really sucks.
I did this like three times before I learned to always plug in the Deck before turning it on if i'm not certain I have good battery.
So what would happen with this plugin installed? Would it wake up and then immediately go to sleep again? Or is there a threshold where it doesn't check if it should sleep within a certain period since waking up? In that case, it would likely shut down as normal. But I'm wondering if there's a chance the plug-in catches that and makes it go back to sleep. Because that would be excellent as long as I knew what was happening.
When the deck goes to sleep, it does the suspend animation, so you know it's going to sleep. If I remember right you'll also have a notification in the bottom right of the screen saying low battery or something similar when it happens.
If the deck is asleep and gets low on power, nothing will happen. I guess if you wake up the deck with the power low enough it might flash the low battery notification and go back to sleep, but I've never had that happen. I had mine set to auto sleep at 5% and I never tried to wake the deck back up before I plugged it in after the auto suspend.
I was mainly using it back when there was a nasty bug that the deck dying from low power could result in the CPU/GPU being permanently throttled to 400 Mhz, effectively making the deck useless.
Shouldn't the Steam Deck give a notification when the battery is low? Have you turned that off?
Yes at 10% but like other people said it flashes once then goes away. Depending on the game that 10% might only last another 10-30 mins max so it's easy to miss then have the Steam Deck just shutdown.
I get this when it reaches 10% iirc
Mine notifies when it hits 10%, but it is easily missed. I wish it was a persistent overlay rather than a quick flash, i also wish it s at 25%.
Yes it's already there, you just have to activate the performance overlay in the "•••" menu.
You can easily alter one of the presets to only show battery percentage by editing /home/deck/.config/MangoHud/preset.conf using this documentation.
My goto preset only shows FPS, watts and battery percentage.
One of the Game Mode overlays already has a timer in the top right corner that estimates your remaining battery life
I have an app on my phone with permission to display on top of other apps that draws a line around the camera cut out showing the battery charge level no matter what I am doing on the phone. In some older phone with no cutout I used to have a horizontal line in the top of the screen.
Which app is that? Looking for a better solution for that myself (on Android).
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=you.in.spark.energy
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=apps.ijp.energy.bar.curved.edition
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=you.in.spark.energy.ring.gen
Thanks!
I think its under settings in the same area where you find the frame rate overlay. I'm in bed and not getting up to check but I seem to remember it in that area.
The Deck uses MangoHUD to draw FPS over the screen. Maybe it can be utilised to show the battery.
