KB: Phone not/barely charging from power supplies when keyboard is not full

[Phalio]

My results are a bit different, but I have only been running my keyboard on Mobian since I got it.
I discovered I need to turn off my keyboard separate from turning off the phone,
To turn off the keyboard battery the amount of time to hold the keyboard power button seems to vary for me from about 4 to 13 seconds,
but in settings ==> Power  I can see when the phone battery says 'charging' or 'discharging'...

Occasionally I have to hold the keyboard button longer to shut it off, but most of the time a quick double press works. My OS also always recognises the phone to be in a charging state whenever the keyboard battery is switched on or there is a power supply plugged into the keyboard, even if it’s not actually getting any power yet while the keyboard battery is charging. Since deactivating the keyboard charging chip with the button also leaves one unable to get any readings from the battery (and spams TTY with error messages), I usually use the userspace driver instead to toggle the keyboard battery charging the phone with ppkb-i2c-charger-ctl power-off. That way I can still read the keyboard battery values while the phone is neither charging from it nor in a charging state that inhibits sleep. Though I usually activate sleep manually whenever I’m done for maximum battery life.

Several times after turning off the phone over night with both batteries showing 100%
I restarted in the morning to find the keyboard once at 0% and the phone battery 93 - 95%,
another time - keyboard at 83% - phone at 99%

The keyboard completely draining over night only happened to me like once when it was not connected to a power supply and the phone battery was low with the phone switched on instead of off or sleeping, therefore consuming the keyboard’s battery over night and never going into sleep mode. The times when your batteries discharged so much over night sounds more like the phone was active and doing power intensive things. Only losing 20 % keyboard battery charge sounds more sensible, but still a little much. By turning the phone off, do you mean fully shutting it down or merely turning the screen off? Only turning the screen off and the keyboard battery losing charge sounds like the keyboard was supplying the phone and therefore inhibiting sleep and using a lot more power than it had to. Turning keyboard -> phone charging off via the hardware button or command or manually activating sleep with systemctl suspend could help with that.

But since this is beta hardware, software, and firmware, it can change drastically with a single update.

That’s true. What I’m wondering is if the keyboard battery > phone charging priority with power supplies is an unchangeable hardware property of the current model or if I or possible software updates could influence it.

Why is your phones usb port covered ?

To prevent me (or unsuspecting other people) from accidentally plugging in a power supply there and frying the keyboard charging chip. That way I can simply plug it in and don’t have to quadruple-check and worry about using the right port and my flat bursting into flames. That usually only happens when I cook.