Phone Hotspot Causes Power Loss and Blank Screen

[tekchip]

This is certainly weird and I wonder if this might be related to other folks who have problems with screen blanks and battery power issues but haven't connected it with the use of a smartphone hot spot.

I made notes as it was happening so here's the play by play.

Approx 10:40am attempted to connect to mobile wifi. Screen went blank on hitting connect after entering my password

10:50am "shutting down out of battery" and power off. Battery at last glance was approx 78%

Unit won't power back on. Ive attempted a long press followed by a 3-4sec press to try to get a power reset. Have tried this 2x.

Plugging the official charger into wall power caused the unit to boot immediately. Unit boots reporting slow charger. Maybe I mixed up the cables? (spoiler: I did. Oops) Still odd that applying power caused it to boot.

Not wanting to poke the bear and perhaps exacerbate the issue, and also not having any additional troubleshooting facilities like a monitor for going to desktop mode and digging logs, I decided just to read and work on it later.

Fast forward to later last night. I took the deck out and to my surprise it fired right up. Connected to home wifi just fine. Acted like nothing was wrong. Battery was just below that 78%, like 76 or so. I found that strange to think the hotspot could be the culprit somehow but that's where the troubleshooting was pointing.

So I tried the following. Got the official charger, finally, and charged to something like 85%. Played Star Wars squadrons, on battery, until about 65%. No loss of power. WTF!?

So then I went back to the hotspot hypothesis. Started the hotspot on my phone. Tried to connect with the deck. Sure enough the moment I hit the connect button after entering the wifi password the screen goes blank, like powered off. I can long press for 10 seconds to power all the way down then boot back up. The next boot if I try to reconnect to the hotspot it'll accept the password and then connect to the hotspot just fine.

So, the blank screen problem is now repeatable.

The power problem has yet to crop back up since I've been home.

This post is already long so I'll post data about my phone, hotspot settings etc. in a follow up comment to this post. I just needed to get this issue on the books while I had some time.

[Marlock]

that's probably due to an issue with the wifi that causes powerdows, notably when downloading large files

here is my list of common Steam Deck wifi workarounds, while Valve works on a fix for the wifi drivers

1) enable developer mode, then go to the new "developer" tab in steam settings and disable wifi power savings

2) unhide your wifi ssid if hidden (hiding it is well know to not really be useful for privacy nor for security, by the way)

3) if 2,4GHz and 5GHz bands are joined in a single ssid, split them in the router configs and use only one of them

4) choose a fixed wifi channel instead of leaving it in auto (configure the same channel in both the router and the deck)

5) try a different router brand/model or a smartphone wifi hotspot... some people have issues only with certains devices but not with others

6) try an ethernet dongle instead of the deck's wifi

7) try a wifi dongle with well-known good linux support instead of using the built-in wifi chip

[tekchip]

@Marlock thanks for the response!

The battery warnings may have been while downloading some updates. Though I wouldn't classify them as large. 115Mb or so update to Dead Cells and some other small shader cache updates you normally get. So that doesn't seem like what you describe.

The second problem is the screen going blank/losing power. This was happening immediately after typing my wifi password and hitting the connect button. So this was well before any downloads would have initiated.

If anyone knows of specifically which logs I should check and where to find them point me in the right direction. The deck seems to run fine as long as I'm not connecting to my phone so I can get at whatever might be helpful. I also noted date and times so I should know when to look in the logs.

Having said that I'll give some of the more logical suggestions a shot like fixed channel, disabling power saving, a dongle instead of the internal wifi. Test, see what happens and report back.

[Marlock]

1) The issue is more common in larger downloads but not exclusive to those... 100MB is quite large already

2) A powerdown while connecting is also common (due to it some folks report they can't get past the wifi config screen in the initial system setup)

3) I know from previous threads that Valve is already working on fixing the Deck's wifi driver issues with help from some tech-savvy users and they also got hold of a few units with known issues that were sent to them via RMA

You could just wait and they'll eventually get this sorted out (but it might take a fair while since this is a fairly widespread problem and their engineers have been looking into it for a few months but there is still no fix, so likely not a trivial matter)

In any case if you're willing to dig into your issue on your own, "SteamOS 3" is a custom linux distribution made by Valve for the Steam Deck but it's fairly similar to what's found in "normal" linux distros... you should be able to go into desktop mode, open Konsole (the app that provides access to the linux terminal on that distro) and type "dmesg" then press enter

It will probably spill out a huge amount of logs, so you can do a few things to waddle through the mud and find what you're looking for

The easiest thing to do is pass a parameter to dmesg so it only outputs the more severe alert message levels (which should be the case, since whatever goes wrong is crashing the screen or the entire OS):

dmesg -n alert

If that shows nothing useful, check the other possible levels

dmesg --help output

Then run dmesg -n xxxxxxx again with the desired message level


You can also "pipe" (pass along) the output of dmsg to another nifty little program called "grep" that filters lines of text to show only the ones containing a specific keyword (eg: "wlan" for wifi):

dmesg | grep "wlan"

Adapt the target keyword as necessary...


And finally it could be useful to know how to redirect all of this terminal output to a text file instead of just displaying it in Konsole, so you can later post those logs in an online pastebin and send the url here for more help

dmesg &>~/filename.txt

Appending "&>xxxxx/xxxxx/xxxxx.xxx" to a command sends the output to the chosen file in the chosen path.

Using a "~" character at the beginning of the path is a short way to signal the path to your linux user home folder.


PS: I'm fairly certain there are other logs files and commands where useful info could be found, but unfortunately I'm not a linux expert and this is just the one place I've had to look in my own experience with hardware issues on a PC running linux a couple years ago

PPS: If you want the real linux gurus to help, go to the Steam for Linux steam discussions forum and create a thread there... there's a bunch of really knowledgeable people there hanging around and helping out when someone has a hairy issue like this

[tekchip]

Thanks for this guidance. I'm not entirely new to Linux but I've had rare occasion to do log spelunking so things like the -n alert for dmesg is new. I usually just grep dmesg output if I have a vague idea what I'm after. I'll do some looking around and report back if I find anything interesting. Thanks again!