A 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.
Thank you so much for that! That plugin seems like something I would rather want. I prefer it to suspend before it completely shuts down if I'm dumb enough to still be playing :)
I need to study this mangopeel, see what is possible and what not.
Again thank you!
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.
Good to hear, and, wow, that's scary