Waking an acer laptop from sleep with the lid closed

I have an Acer Aspire E5-571G laptop that I want to use with the lid closed. Ideally I would want to power it off and boot it without opening the lid, but I dismissed that idea. In any case I would like to suspend and wake the machine with a closed lid.

I have connected the laptop via HDMI to an external display and have a Logitech wireless mouse and keyboard that I use via a Unifying receiver. I am running the latest PopOS 21.10 on Linux Kernel 5.15.8.

With the lid open my setup works fine. I can suspend the machine and wake it with my keyboard.

Closing the lid prevents waking from sleep. When I press a key on my external keyboard, the LED on the laptop briefly flashes blue (indicating a wake), but quickly goes back to orange (indicating a suspended state). This makes me think that using an external keyboard is not the problem, especially since waking with the lid open works fine. Wedging a piece of cardboard into the closed laptop and moving that over a key to wake it results in the LED rapidly flashing orange, without waking the laptop.

My guess is that there is some hardware switch that prevents a wake when the lid is closed. I could not find any information on this (English is not my first language, so using the right search terms is difficult), and I am not experienced with hardware, so I did not try to open the laptop looking for a "switch".

How can I wake my laptop with the lid closed?

I would prefer a software solution, but I am willing to do (easy) hardware modifications if someone knows any details about this.

I have an Acer Aspire E5-571G laptop that I want to use with the lid closed. Ideally I would want to power it off and boot it without opening the lid, but I dismissed that idea. In any case I would like to suspend and wake the machine with a closed lid. I am willing to do (easy) hardware modifications if someone knows any details about this.

This is quite easy to do and I have done this (lid closed) for many laptops.

Get an Acer Dock for your laptop. It will have power supply connection and power switch. Attach Monitor, keyboard and mouse.

Now the lid stays closed all the time. Works great.

The lid switch is likely a magnetic switch and hardware modifications to the laptop may be very tricky without producing desired results.

In the disassembly guide for the Acer Aspire E5-571G, it appears that the lid switch might be on the blue part, shown below. If you're up for hardware hacking, check whether the switch is in the open or closed position with the lid up, and either bypass it (if closed when lid is up) or disconnect it (if the converse is the case).

If you plan to use the lid switch later, then use a reed switch and an external magnet to bypass the switch without drilling a hole in the case, as would be needed for a mechanical switch.