• Overview
• Reset
• Shutdown
• Integrations
• Dependencies
• Getting Started
• Example Configuration

powerkit

powerkit is an advanced safe shutdown tool that supports both safe power shutdown and safe emulator shutdown.

Overview

powerkit is a service that runs in the background with 2 primary goals:

• Responding to physical reset buttons based on the current running context
• Responding to physical shutdown buttons

The signals for the physical buttons can come from multiple sources:

• Physical switches on the case (e.g. argon1, nespi, gpi, etc.)
• Button combinations on a joystick
• Button combinations on a keyboard

powerkit is similar, in roots, to the ES-generic-shutdown project, but introduces several additional features.

Reset

The function of “reset” varies depending on the context in which the system is running:

• If an emulator is running, reset will terminate the emulator and return to EmulationStation
• If EmulationStation is running, reset will restart EmulationStation
• If neither an emulator nor EmulationStation is running, reset will restart the OS

The major benefit of this, combined with powerkit’s integration with RetroArch input configuration profiles, is that you can utilize your existing exit input configurations across all standalone emulators. For example, suppose you’ve configured the following:

• Hotkey: select
• Start button: start
• quit_press_twice = true

In this scenario, pressing select+start twice would exit a libretro emulator. When powerkit is running, it will read these configurations from RetroArch and implement the same behavior for standalone emulators. This means you don’t have to worry about which combinations of buttons / menus to go through for each emulator.

Delays

In order to ensure that powerkit doesn’t attempt a reset for libretro emulators when using the joystick/keyboard exit_emulator hotkey combo, powerkit will wait a configured number of seconds before it terminates the emulator. This ensures that any libretro emulator is given enough time to gracefully terminate before powerkit kicks in.

Reset protection

In some cases, you may accidentally press a physical reset button multiple times or press the exit button combo multiple times on your joystick. To protect against interpreting this as multiple resets, powerkit will suppress any reset that happens less than 5 seconds after a prior reset. This window can be configured in the powerkit.cfg file.

Shutdown

The function of “shutdown” is consistent for every integration: it will gracefully turn off the system.

Note that there is currently no integration for shutdown with the joystick / keyboard. Instead, this must be done either from the case or from the EmulationStation menu.

Hold Time

In some cases, such as with the NesPi case, you can configure how long the shutdown button must be pressed before a shutdown event is interpreted. By default, this is 2 seconds.

Integrations

The actual buttons that trigger a reset or shutdown will vary based on case:

Case	Function	How to trigger
nespi	reset	Press the “Reset” button
nespi	shutdown	Press the “Power” button
argon1	reset	Double tap the Power button
argon1	shutdown	Hold the Power button for 3+ seconds
gpi2	shutdown	Switch power to off

For the keyboard, reset will be based on the following RetroArch configurations:

• quit_press_twice - Whether the quit hotkey combo must be pressed twice
• input_enable_hotkey - The hotkey that’s expected to be pressed
• input_exit_emulator - The key used for exiting the emulator

For joysticks, reset will be based on the following RetroArch configurations:

• quit_press_twice - Whether the quit hotkey combo must be pressed twice
• input_enable_hotkey_btn - The hotkey that’s expected to be used
• input_exit_emulator_btn - The button used for exiting the emulator

Dependencies

powerkit has minimal dependencies:

• devicekit
• psutil
• gpiozero

To install the relevant Python dependencies:

powerkit/setup.sh depends

Note that devicekit must be present in the same parent directory as powerkit.

To remove dependencies:

powerkit/setup.sh remove

To install powerkit via the retrokit setupmodule:

bin/setup.sh install powerkit

Getting Started

To use the powerkit CLI manually:

python3 powerkit/cli.py /path/to/powerkit.cfg

Example Configuration

[provider]

# Name of the software shutdown provider to use (hotkey is always enabled)
id = argon1

[reset]

# Whether to enable a reset button
# enabled = true

# Minimum number of seconds that must pass before another reset is processed
# min_process_interval = 5

[shutdown]

# Whether to enable a shutdown button
# enabled = true

# Total number of seconds before a held button is considered for shutdown
# hold_time = 2

[hotkey]

# Whether to enable reset functionality via keyboard retroarch exit hotkeys
# keyboard = true

# Whether to enable reset functionality via joystick retroarch exit hotkeys
# joystick = true

# Number of seconds to delay until triggering a reset after the hotkey combo is detected
# trigger_delay = 2

[logging]

# Log-level (DEBUG, INFO, WARN, ERROR)
# level = INFO