uConsole-Sleep — power-key sleep service
paragonnov's Debian package remaps the power key to a real screen-off sleep: backlight and LCD off, keyboard unpowered, CPU pinned to its minimum clock.
What it takes
- Software only
- Config change
Difficulty 1 of 3 — easy.
Details
uConsole-sleep is a pair of small Python services. One watches the power key with epoll and turns the display off (or, on a long press, shows a power menu) instead of shutting down; the other uses inotify to notice the screen going off, then drops the CPU's maximum frequency to its minimum and cuts keyboard power until the next press. It ships as a .deb built from the repo, is MIT-licensed and configurable in /etc/uconsole-sleep/config — the DRM-off step can be disabled if your desktop wakes up rotated, which is what Xfce users hit before v1.2.
Tested by the author on Ubuntu 22.04 and Rex's Bookworm Lite with GNOME 47; v1.3 improved CM5 detection, though one CM5 user on Bookworm 6.12 with KDE Wayland saw no CPU frequency change. It grew out of grandrew's quasi-sleep thread, which remains the place for the measurements.
Links
Open at Forum thread- GitHubRepository
- Forum: grandrew's sleep-support threadForum
Related mods
With no real suspend on the CM4, grandrew's script fakes it: busy processes throttled to 1–2 % CPU, backlight off, powersave governor — about 13 h on a charge.
Michael_Wolf's Lua monitor for clock, power draw, temperature and battery, plus the benchmark showing the backlight is what actually drains a uConsole.
hotellonely's Python script logs the PMIC's voltage and current every 0.1 s until the console dies, giving a real watt-hour figure for any cell or pack.
Any genuine branded 3,000–3,500 mAh 18650 works, flat-top or button-top; listings claiming much more than 3,500 mAh are fakes.
The 21700 version of HG's NVMe battery board fits the stock backplate and roughly doubles runtime: 4 h 31 min of 1080p playback against 2 h 27 min on 18650s.
On the original CM4 image the kernel left the charger at 300 mA while running; a one-line udev rule sets constant_charge_current to 2.4 A.