<< Solved >> Dell 7577 Monterey not recognising battery charger disconnected

[B.A.C.H]

Dear fellow hackintoshers,

I am currently working on setting up Monterey on the Dell Inspiron 7577 and facing a strange issue that I could not pin down.
Whenever I power up the computer with the power cord attached it will not recognise if I subsequently disconnect it. The battery still shows up as if it was charging. Moreover, if I power it up without the power cable attached, any further connecting and disconnecting of the power cable will be notified with a significant delay (more than 30 seconds).
I've checked the "fixing power management" and "fixing battery readouts" in Dortania's guide but could not find anything suspicious: the X86Platform Plugin seems correctly installed, the battery readouts are correct, as long as the computer does not "forget" it is no longer connected to power and sleep works without any problems (at least, so far...).
The problem persists for SMBios set to MacbookPro14,1; MacbookPro14,2 and MacbookPro14,3, however the keyboard backlight and powerLED turn off whenever I unplug the cable and turn on when power is restored.

What could be the cause?
Many thanks in advance!

 

[B.A.C.H]

I think I found the solution:

Apparently, the problem is related to VirtualSMC's handling of the battery. I replaced it with FakeSMC and the OS now immediately recognises changes with the power cable.
However, as so often, it is a trade-off: VirtualSMC did a fantastic job of recognising the sensors on my CPU and GPU and with FanControl I could even fine tune the fan speed, which on a noisy machine like the Dell 7577 was a bliss and is not even possible in Windows. FakeSMC on the other hand does not seem to recognise the sensors at all.

Since the problem clearly has to do with VirtualSMC's power management, it would be great if someone working on its development could investigate what could be causing such strange behaviour.

 

[B.A.C.H]

Update:

In the end, the problem with the power cable not being recognised had absolutely nothing to do with FakeSMC vs. VirtualSMC (well, almost...)

Turns out that it was the Macs Fan Control app that was interfering with the power managing kexts. Once closed everything worked as expected. FakeSMC seems to hide various sensors to the operating system, which in turn means that Fan Control cannot interfere with the power management.

This means I will have to choose between a silent laptop or a proper battery readout, but then life is full of tough choices...

 

[uktechmike]

Hello B.A.C.H, I am just researching and trying to install the oSX on my 7577 i7 7700HQ GTX 1060 Max Q, may be the EFI you shared will work ? do you have any for this version ?

 

[B.A.C.H]

Hello B.A.C.H, I am just researching and trying to install the oSX on my 7577 i7 7700HQ GTX 1060 Max Q, may be the EFI you shared will work ? do you have any for this version ?

Hello there,
I'm happy to attach my EFI folder. However, please keep in mind that your hardware does not exactly match mine. My 7577 has a gtx1050ti and a 1080p display, while yours probably is the model with upgraded graphics card and screen. Also, I replaced the builtin wifi card with a broadcom one that works out of the box with hackintoshes, so you will need some intel specific kexts (information about it can be found online, for example here) for yours to work.
Finally, I'm using refind to dual-boot windows, any attempt to do so within bootpicker is either a) a failure, b) an incredible pain in the neck needing a lot of manual tweeking of dsdt and ssdts or c) both. You will have to restore the proper boot file to boot directly to your system drive. As a matter of fact I would recommend you only copy the content of the "OC" subfolder if you want to try my setup.

Best!

Edit: notice also that I disabled cfg lock in my bios. If you have not done so already, my config will not work and you will not be able to boot...