M5StickCPlus2 has dedicated hardware (U8 etc.) to power off when the power button is pressed and hold. See schematic here.

Instead of setting POWER_HOLD_PIN low, the power off hardware pulls 3V3EN low which disables the 3.3 V DC/DC converter and thus killing the power to the ESP32.

Note: when the power button is hold long enough you'll see the green LED being turned on, indicating that 3V3EN is low.

Note: power off only works when run from battery.

Thanks
Felix

I'll continue to play around with the demo to get a better grasp of it.

If anyone has another (ideally PlatformIO-based) demo to propose I will have a look at it.

Thanks again,

Ben

there is an alternate way which can turn off the device: if is_test_mode is true then at the end of test_loop() rtc_wakeup_test() is called which at the end sets POWER_HOLD_PIN to LOW turning off the device.

Note: not sure why it doesn't work when you comment out power_off() function as I also don't see it being called anywhere either.

Thanks
Felix