petertree

First off, apologies for the messy blurry photo, I was too excited to post when I got it working.

###What

Add a battery to the Framework Cooler Master case

###Why

I bought this to use as a laptop. I bought a 20k mAh 100W anker power bank, but it's very expensive ($150) and only gives 1 hour of battery life. Further, if you plug in the Anker and unplug the power supply, the main board dies before the handshake. The mainboard does do the handshake to the new power source until the old one is unplugged.

Want to unplug the AC charger and plug in a power bank? Too bad. You need to fully shutdown first then switch or risk losing all your work. The battery is so much cheaper than a 100W power bank, (but more dangerous and explosive).

###How

I drilled a very messy hole using a dremel (it was late and I had limited time to cut without waking up neighbors)

I fed the battery cable from the gray underside of the case then carefully bent the battery backward till the black non-QR code face was against the underside of the case. This unfortunately blocks the fan so I made some quick cardboard supports out of the battery packaging which is surprisingly sturdy.

These plastic box lids happen to be the almost exact width of the battery, just cut some slits into one of the ends as its 3mm less wide than it needs to be. You donot want the plastic battery frame to bend as bare batteries are highly explosive. If I knew what I was doing I'd have liked to remove all half the cells from the battery to make it more compact, and use the Anker power bank. I've always had horrible battery life on previous laptops and always sit next to an outlet. My compromise is to set the charge threshold very low so I feel safer about this explosive pack on the back of the case.

###Misc

The JSAUX Steam Deck dock is inexpensive and works nicely to hold the mainboard at a cool angle while also providing more USB ports, charging, Ethernet than just using the included VESA rubber dock(y).

I use this with a (refurbished) thinkpad USB keyboard and xreal air OLED glasses like so (a bit overpriced at about $340, but compact and pleasantly crisp)

I also have a Thinkvision M14 USB-C monitor that I bought used, my eyes and head get tired of the glasses for longer sessions.

##Verdict

I'm really really happy with this combination. I bought the i7 11th gen mainboard for $299 on sale to use instead of a laptop. I feel like I get a framework laptop but a Thinkpad keyboard which is my dream. My ultimate dream would be to build the big brother to the Raspberry Pi 400, with the mainboard under a Thinkpad or Tex Shinobi keyboard.

I've also envisioned being able to remotely power on the main board sitting in my backpack to do more compute intensive tasks and SSH through my phone to stream/get results.

I'll get off my soap box now, do let me know thoughts

I thought of making a metal enclosure that goes under the base of the case but the battery cable doesn't seem to want to bend too much.

I recently saw this video where he manages to get the 61 wH battery in a small form factor.

Does anyone have ideas on how best to mount the battery to the Cooler Master case?

Two issues have plagued the official dock for me:

1. After waking up from sleep, HDMI is black unless AC adapter is unplugged and re-plugged

2. Wake on Lan doesn't work because the deck going to sleep seems to put the dock to sleep, the Ethernet lights turn off

I solved both using a smart plug. I have a Sonoff (S40 Lite) and a TP-Link Kasa, both have Python packages to control via terminal which led me to choose them.

To enable Power on AC attach:

Shutdown the steam deck fully (not sleep). Hold Volume '+' button and power on to go to BIOS. Go to setup, power, Power on AC Attach and enable.

I set up SSH keys for the steam deck from my phone using Termux on Android. I power it off using an ssh command from my termux, then use a python command to turn off the smart plug as well (you can use the web app or smartphone app just as well, using python just let's me link it all into one command)

To turn on, I just turn on the smart plug and seems to fix the HDMI black screen issue too!

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