PS3 Controller Auto Turn Off

joinski

Would it be possible to implement the feature of PS3 Controller Auto Turn Off after inactivity for about 10 minutes?

What i found with using google:
https://www.reddit.com/r/RetroPie/comments/4uaaxy/ps3_bluetooth_controller_turning_it_off_after_x/
https://www.reddit.com/r/RetroPie/comments/3j9ov5/ps3_bluetooth_timeout/cunjpgw/

nadenislamarre

https://github.com/batocera-linux/batocera.linux/commit/b1c53435202eb2213a78579f9b1794fff37fe713

joinski

nadenislamarre
Hi Nicolas,

does that mean, there is already Auto Turn Off after 30 minutes implemented in batocera?
The reason, why i would like to have this feature is, that i have a friend, who is using a RPi2 with batocera and she never turns off the Pi (instead she just turns off the TV after playing or switches the input to watch television and lets the Pi powered on all the time), so that after a few days the battery of the PS3 controller gets empty. The next time she wants to play, she always have to load the battery first, which is a bit annoying.

But when i think about it, then it could be, that on her RPi2 not batocera, but recalbox is installed :-O
I have to check this, the next time i visit her.

Best regards,
John

nadenislamarre

i don't know how the inactivity detection works, but it's not always easy to detect.
some pads are very sensible (or firmware badly written), and thus, regularly send events.
So, on the linux side, detect inactivity is complicated on such pad. I think that's should be more a job of the pad itself.

nadenislamarre

note that recalbox uses old underlying system stack ; so maybe recent stack handles this better.

DunnPenny

As per my knowledge you can set the amount of time until the system turns off for and forOther Features.
The system will not turn off automatically when background download is being performed. When the download is complete, the system will turn off automatically.

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joinski

I checked and it is batocera 5.17 installed on her Pi2.
With current 5.19 beta (https://batocera-linux.xorhub.com/upgrades/rpi3/beta/last/batocera-5.19-rpi3-20181020.img.gz) on my Pi3, Auto Off also does not work (i waited more than 30 Minutes).

Would really be great, if you could implement this feature for the next version 😉

joinski

OMG! I'm so dumb!

I've just discovered that you can change the PS3 controller driver in /recalbox/share/system/recalbox.conf.
I switched from bluez to official and now the controller turns off after 30 minutes inactivity 🙂
And as a positive side effect: Control within kodi now works with 2 same controllers 🙂

But to get PS3 controllers working via bluetooth wirelessly with official drivers, you have to pair them at least once with bluez drivers activated before.
If you first switch to official drivers without pairing controllers before with bluez, you can not get them to work without usb-cable connected.

And there are several disadvantages that result from switching to official:
- the 4 LEDs on the controller are constantly flashing (with bluez driver on Controller/Player 1 only first LED is permanently on), but it can be fixed by just starting a PSX game (hmm, strange)
- you can not see the battery status of the controller in System Settings, Information anymore
- problems in dreamcast emulators with official drivers:

Reicast - Reicast (which is default)
left analog stick reacts strange... when pushing left analog stick hard to left it goes to right and when you push hard up, it goes to down. If you just push the analog carefully for about 50% it works as it should (up is up and left is left), but if you push 100% to left or up it goes to right respectively down)
It is the exact same problem, as this user here had with recalbox: https://forum.recalbox.com/topic/15290/dreamcast-ps3-controller-issue.
But according to the answer of the user Substring, it seems that it is a known reicast problem and does not occur with bluez drivers (the answers in this post from my side can be ignored, i was confused and have mixed up something)

Libretro - Reicast
rumble behaves strange in some games (like Crazy Taxi for example, it rumbles almost all the time. Strangely it does not rumble, when crashing against walls or into other cars. Because of all that rumble the battery of the controller quickly drains to zero and controller turns off after short time 🙁
and i could not find the option in RetroArch Menu to disable rumble)

With bluez drivers you do not have those problems in Dreamcast emulators.

I also tested with shanwan drivers, and it behaves exactly the same as with official drivers.

poke

joinski keep in mind some emulators dont support joystick hotpluging (joystick turns off after some time and back on). it will work fine with RA, but standalone emus are a different story. @luizthiago already reported problems in some emus.

joinski

The cause of the strange behaviour with official driver in Reicast (left Analog stick far up becomes down, and far left becomes right) was discussed here:
https://github.com/reicast/reicast-emulator/issues/855#issuecomment-152828431

So it seems, that the driver is buggy.

After some research via google i found this interesting topic:
https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/15967/sony-dualshock-3-call-for-testers-sixaxis-script-module

So "psyke83" is working on a better alternative to the old sixad-driver
https://github.com/RetroPie/RetroPie-Setup/pull/2263

It is for retropie and it is still work in progress at the moment.
But maybe it could be used for Batocera yet? (or later)
Because it could maybe solve some of the issues.

joinski

poke
okay, i see.
Do you think it is possible to deactivate idle timeout, while a game is running?
Like a script that runs when you start any of the emulators, which then sets "enable_timeout" from 1 to 0?
But when you quit the emulator and you are back in ES Menu, then "enable_timeout" should be set to 1 again automatically.
So that the controllers only turn off after 30 minutes inactivity while you are in ES and not while playing a game.
Do you think that would be possible?

luizthiago

poke Yes, i have this issue ...when disconnecting pads due to inactivity in N64 and Dreamcast , so, the pad not working again into emulator ....

johnodon

There are only two reasons why I have not yet fully moved away from Retropie (x64) to Batocera. This is one of them. I cannot rely on my 7 and 9 year old boys to hold down the PS button for 10 seconds to turn off controllers. It just won't happen.

The other reason in theme support. I wish we had more options for Batocera.

John