Smart Screen¶
Shows the handheld's live values on a Turzx USB IPS screen: the Turing Smart Screen 3.5" and the UsbMonitor 3.5", 5" and 7" of the same family. CPU, GPU, temperatures, power, memory, battery, network and disk, with the time, the date and the weather if you want them, in six themes or your own colors. It is the BC250 Bazzite Suite's USB IPS3.5 made for the handheld, and it takes the place of the screen maker's own app (UsbMonitor).
Smart Screen is on the portal's Utilities tab: A on its tile installs it, and once it is installed, A opens it. It is also in the Start menu (Windows Portable Suite, Smart Screen). It opens full screen; B goes back and ⧉ (View) exits it.
What you need¶
- The screen, plugged into the handheld or into its dock. It needs no driver: Windows gives it its own serial driver and makes it a COM port (such as COM3) by itself. Nothing needs an administrator.
- The screen maker's app closed. One program at a time can use the screen; while UsbMonitor has it, the Screen card says In use by another program and the app tries again by itself.
The window¶
Six cards on the left, Screen, Values, Look, Clock, Weather and Start; the middle shows the focused card's rows, and the right side the picture the screen shows now. The d-pad or the left stick moves the amber focus. Every action is a button, listed in the row at the bottom with what it does where the focus is: A included. Press the button, or tap the entry. B goes back, from a row to its card. ⧉ (View) exits the app; while the screen is connected, it asks for a second press. ☰ (Menu) opens the information of the pane that shows; the information icon at a pane's top right does the same by touch.
A row with choices steps to the next one with A or RB, and back with LB. The screen and the picture beside the panes change at once.
The app looks for the screen as soon as it opens: that is its work. The first time it finds it, it restarts the screen once, so it starts from a clean state (a picture cut off halfway before would shift everything after it). Then it sends the picture every second, only the parts that changed: a few KB, where the whole screen takes almost two seconds. A screen unplugged and plugged in again is found again and gets the whole picture.
Screen¶
The screen's state: which screen it is, its COM port, its size and how much the last update sent.
| Row | What it does |
|---|---|
| Brightness | A and RB brighter, LB darker, in steps of 10 %. |
| Orientation | Portrait, Landscape, and each upside down: how the screen stands. Turn it upside down when its USB cable is at the bottom or on the other side. Lying down, the tiles go in two columns. |
| Backlight | A switches the screen dark and back on; the app keeps running. It is on at every start. |
| Save the picture | What the screen shows, at its own size, as a PNG in your Pictures folder, in a Smart Screen folder; Explorer then opens on it with the new file selected. |
| Save a report | Every value at this moment, with the date, the time and its offset from UTC, as a text file in your Documents folder, in a Smart Screen folder. |
Values¶
What the screen shows, a tile each, in this order; A puts a value on the screen or takes it off. At first: CPU, GPU, Power, RAM, Battery and Network.
| Tile | What it shows |
|---|---|
| CPU | The CPU's load, with its clock and temperature. |
| GPU | The GPU's load, with its temperature. |
| CPU temp, GPU temp | The temperature in large, with a bar from 0 to 100 °C. |
| Power | The power the whole chip draws, CPU and GPU together. |
| RAM | The memory in use, of what Windows has after the graphics took its share. |
| Battery | The charge, and whether the charger is in. |
| Network | Download and upload. |
| Disk | Reads and writes of the drives. |
| Weather | The temperature and the sky at the place chosen on the Weather card. |
A temperature turns orange from 80 °C and red from 90 °C; on battery, the charge turns orange at 20 % and red at 10 %. The Network adapter row picks the adapter the Network tile measures, or all of them added up.
The temperatures, the power and the GPU's load come from AMD's driver, as in Windows Portable Test. On a handheld without it, the GPU's load is Windows' own and the CPU's temperature and the power show —. Windows does not report a fan.
Look¶
| Row | What it does |
|---|---|
| Theme | Dark (with the suite's amber), Light, Midnight, Ember, Forest or Mono. |
| Text, Tiles, Accent and Background color | Your own color instead of the theme's, from a palette of fourteen. X puts the theme's back. |
| Header text | Your own text in the screen's header, up to 24 characters: A opens a page with a field, R3 (the right stick pressed) Windows' touch keyboard, X pastes what you copied, A keeps it. At first it is the handheld's name as its firmware gives it (ROG XBOX Ally X); empty, the header shows only the time. |
| Background | A picture of your own behind the tiles, cut to the screen's shape: A opens the browser (your usual folders and every drive; A opens a folder or takes the picture, B goes up), X takes it away. PNG, JPEG, WebP or BMP. The app keeps where the picture is, not a copy: leave it there. |
Clock¶
The time in the screen's header is Windows', in its time zone: summer and winter time follow by themselves.
| Row | Choices |
|---|---|
| Time | 24-hour, or 12-hour with AM and PM. |
| Time zone | Not shown, or its offset from UTC (UTC+1 in winter, UTC+2 in summer in Amsterdam). |
| Date | Not shown, the weekday with the day and the month, DD-MM-YYYY, MM/DD/YYYY or YYYY-MM-DD, under the time. |
Weather¶
The weather comes from Open-Meteo, free and without an account. A on the Place row opens a page to type a city or a town; the places found are listed under it, and A on one uses it and puts the Weather tile on the screen. No weather forgets the place.
When Open-Meteo is busy (it sometimes answers 503, the service is overloaded) or cannot be reached, the Weather card says so, and the weather is asked for again 30 minutes later. Until then the tile keeps the last weather it had, or says unavailable now when it has none yet.
What is sent: the name you search for, and then the place's coordinates every 30 minutes, only while the Weather tile is on the screen. Nothing else about you. Without a place nothing goes over the network.
Start¶
| Row | What it does |
|---|---|
| Start with Windows, minimized | A shortcut in your Startup folder (nothing in the registry): the app starts minimized when you sign in, and the screen shows the values from then on. Only the app installed from the portal starts so. |
| When the app closes | The screen goes dark, or keeps the last picture it had. |
| Run in the background now | Minimizes the app. The screen goes on showing the values, and the controller belongs to your games again: the app acts only while its window is in front. It comes back from the taskbar or from the portal. |
| The app's log | Read in the pane: the d-pad scrolls it, B goes back. |
Install it on its own¶
The portal installs it. To install it on its own, download wp-smart-v<x.y.z>.zip and SHA256SUMS from its release,
then in PowerShell, in that folder:
(Get-FileHash wp-smart-v<x.y.z>.zip).Hash -eq (-split (Get-Content SHA256SUMS))[0] # True: the download is intact
Expand-Archive wp-smart-v<x.y.z>.zip . -Force
powershell -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -File wp-smart-v<x.y.z>\install.ps1
Installed on its own, it gets a Start-menu entry and a Desktop shortcut. Afterwards the installer asks whether to remove the download.
| Option | |
|---|---|
--no-desktop-shortcut |
the Start-menu entry only |
--uninstall |
remove the app; the settings and the log stay |
--uninstall --purge |
also remove the settings and the log |
Files¶
| Where | What |
|---|---|
%LOCALAPPDATA%\windows-portable-suite\windows-portable-smart\app\ |
The program, Smart-Screen.exe |
%LOCALAPPDATA%\windows-portable-suite\windows-portable-smart\windows-portable-smart.log |
The log |
%APPDATA%\windows-portable-suite\windows-portable-smart.ini |
The settings |
%APPDATA%\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Startup\Smart Screen.lnk |
Start with Windows, while it is on |
Pictures\Smart Screen\, Documents\Smart Screen\ |
The pictures and reports you saved; never removed by the app |