Is there any way to remotely get a low battery notification for my Steam Deck? I don’t use it every day, and batteries don’t like to sit on a charger continuously, so it might sit idle for a couple days, (relatively) slowly losing charge.
I have the Steam App on my phone, and Valve has my email address. It would be great if the Steam Deck could send out an SOS before it dies.
I don’t think that systemd has a whole lot of sleep-management architecture that does what you want? What it does have is the ability to do “suspend-then-hibernate”, which would suspend for some set time, wake up, and flip over to hibernating. I’ve set that up on Debian (not too hard), Ubuntu (pure hell), haven’t tried on SteamOS.
What you want is technically possible without changing the hardware or firmware, but I think it would take an unreasonable amount of systemd coding.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Power_management/Suspend_and_hibernate#Changing_suspend_method
While I am not aware of any way to run custom software on the Steam Deck while it is on standby, you can drastically reduce the power drain if you shut it down fully instead of leaving it on standby. You can either use the “Power” menu after pressing the steam key, or long-press the power button to get the option to do so.
The steam deck already does limit charging to 80% after being plugged in for an extended period of time so the battery cells will still have a charge but no be in the harmful range.
That’s good to know. Thanks!
batteries don’t like to sit on a charge continuously
I absolutely agree for traditional lithium ion batteries, but for lithium polymer batteries, a middle SoC is best for longevity. As far as I understand, it’s better to sit at ~100 SoC than to do full discharge cycles, again unlike older battery tech which absolutely wanted full discharge cycles.
If you wanna be gentle on batteries, it’s more about not rapidly charging them rather than doing charge cycles these days. So if the gameplay loop of optimizing your battery SoC is fun: do that, if not: I wouldn’t bother
https://batteryuniversity.com/article/bu-808-how-to-prolong-lithium-based-batteries
Thanks! I’ll give your link a read and maybe worry a little less.
Man i almost didn’t post this cuz I thought it might turn into a flame war.
Thanks for not being a stereotypical Redditor
Yeah at first the chill is surprising. You can even have conversation thru the comment with people you disagree with without it going full nuclear. (Their are still unaxepting people but they have a tendency to remove and redo accounts so hey if you recognize the name that probably not a troll)
Okey your link is too technical to read after a working day, I will keep it to read at workXD
There might be a Decky plugin that allows you to send alerts likes that.
Edit: here’s the plugins list.
I decided to Take One More Step here and go poke around the plugins. AutoSuspend seems to be the closest match, it’s able to make an audible noise and send a toast. There doesn’t appear to be anything that has yet been built to get a notification to a remote device.
With one slightly weird exception
KDE connect is installed by default on your deck, and has the ability to pass notifications to a connected device. It would technically be possible to permanently Bluetooth connect the deck to another device to facilitate remote notifications, but this would be expensive battery-wise and probably defeat the purpose of having the notifications in the first place
Yeah, I was worried about the battery drain of monitoring the battery, but I figured I’d ask in case there was a built-in solution.
Thanks for looking through the plug-ins while I was sleeping. I’ll take a look at Autosuspend.
