Controller battery level.

[Castyles]

Context: I own a bluetooth controller (8BitDo M30) and, when the battery is about to die, the whole system lags and I get insane frame drops because the controller keeps flooding everything non-stop, while trying to reconnect.

It's lights should tell me the battery level, yeah. Trouble is: they don't.

It either goes from green to blinking green, non-stop, or from green to absolutely nothing.

Question: Does any of you know some kind of *free* program out there that shows the battery level of a controller, with accuracy, OSD?

Cheers.

[xSOSxHawkens]

Originally posted by Castyles:

Context: I own a bluetooth controller (8BitDo M30) and, when the battery is about to die, the whole system lags and I get insane frame drops because the controller keeps flooding everything non-stop, while trying to reconnect.

It's lights should tell me the battery level, yeah. Trouble is: they don't.

It either goes from green to blinking green, non-stop, or from green to absolutely nothing.

Question: Does any of you know some kind of *free* program out there that shows the battery level of a controller, with accuracy, OSD?

Cheers.

This is an issue with BT and the controllers.

The lag issue is BT.

The controller battery issue is typically due to them being calibrated around Alkalines (for something that takes AA packs) or just plain shoddy battery tracking on the part of the controller (for ones with built in packs).

The last generation of controllers with fairly accurate battery gauge was the Xbox 360 which would blink below half and stop vibration below 1/4. Now days the more modern xbox controllers (like the One and X) will say that do that, but in 9/10 cases about the time the battery gets low enough to stop vibration is the moment they start lagging and d/cing from the system.

Can report the same happens with PS4 and Xbox One and Xbox X controllers on Windows 10 over BT.

[_I_]

controller input lag is near zero

its the bt audio lag thats really high
audio needs to be compressed, transferred and decompressed and played, which is why it takes time
bt update rate is nowhere near 40k samples/second (20khz x2 for 2 samples of 20khz wave) for uncompressed audio

battery type
nimh/nicd have no voltage to charge % comparison
lipo/liion have a linear rate from 3v=0% to 4.2v=100% charge

[xSOSxHawkens]

Originally posted by _I_:

controller input lag is near zero

its the bt audio lag thats really high
audio needs to be compressed, transferred and decompressed and played, which is why it takes time
bt update rate is nowhere near 40k samples/second (20khz x2 for 2 samples of 20khz wave) for uncompressed audio

battery type
nimh/nicd have no voltage to charge % comparison
lipo/liion have a linear rate from 3v=0% to 4.2v=100% charge

he isnt talking about input lag.

Its a thing with windows BT controllers, when they get weak the BT link gets broken somehow and before full disconnection it causes some major issues in most games that brings the games to a stutter, if they are local hosted online it will bring the clients to a stutter too. I have only seen it on windows 10, so I am pretty sure its something with how windows is handling the loss of the BT signal. During the loss it will often repeat the last input over and over while stuttering between repeats. Its controller and game agnostic. But I havent seen it on any prior windows version nor on Linux on the Steam Deck. I havent tried 11 so not sure if its an issue there.

Its def one of those "when you see it, you know what they are getting at" types of things. Nothing at all with input latency.

[_I_]

the adapter is handling the connection, it may just be telling windows its connecting/disconnecting when its dropping out

[Castyles]

Exactly. xSOSx is right.

So... Does anyone know an app thst shows the battery level on the screen so I can avoid the issue?

I only found one for PS4 controllers but it doesn't seem to work right, from what I've read and an official one from Microsoft that only works with Xbox controllers, instead of everything.

Thanks.