Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

[brad_chuck]

On most batterys there is a number “Last Full Capacity:” I use this in the script to just simply divide the last full by the current.

if you did not have that last full you could charge your bat overnight and replace the last full number in the script with the full capacity of your battery.

so replace

[Lycanth]

I have this half working [so to speak] it reads my second battery [after modprobing it manually at every boot] but it doesn't pick up my first, also I don't have those battery files in the /proc/acpi [though I'm not really worried about that] is it possible for it to pick up the power in both batteries? also insmod doesn't work either, it just says file/directory doesn't exsist, thinking I might have to copy some files from the CD to my hard drive [I installed Puppy to my hard drive to make it easier]

EDIT: got the files created and stuff, just the insmod comes up as none exsistant, and primary battery is detected, but there's no readout on it's remaining power, but it does report a remaining for my secondary battery if it's installed [either alone in the second slot or with the primary battery] is there a way of making puppy auto load the modprobes to save typing it in on each boot?

EDIT 2: ok, checked about a little and found out the following
BAT1 [secondary] detects battery presence, monitors state, displays remaining power for any battery inserted
BAT0 [primary] as above but doesn't show remaining power for any battery, am I the only one with that problem?

[peppyy]

Works well on 2.0.1 ibm thinkpad t22. I don't need the freespace indicator there as much as I do the battery since I am using a hd install and have 4gb left. I will look at the switch and change it for my needs. It is a bit distracting when it resizes.

Nice job!

[Braden]

I couldn't get my system to modprobe ac, but there's a charging flag in the battery's state file.

I don't like the switching mode either, I'd rather have both the battery and the RAM-remaining displayed at once. Or better yet, have it change on clicks: power, RAM, and whatever other information we give it.

Would you consider releasing your source code? If you'd rather not release it, fine, but I think it would allow for better customization, and is more in the spirit of Puppy in particular and Linux in general. Dotpups are great for general users, but I imagine there's plenty of coders here who'd love to sink their teeth into the source and tweak it to their own preferences.

Maybe include some manner of control file, at least, allowing us to set the frequency of the switching, or disable the switching, or add new displays entirely, providing the name of a script to execute.

Also, if you have it reading that file entirely from inside your C code, there will be no easy way to handle slight differences in the battery and ac formats.

[brad_chuck]

New dotpup see main post.

(batmon0.0.7.pup)

[brad_chuck]

Another addition See first post.

[MU]

oh, I was curious about our first gins program
Tested it, though I have no battery extensions loaded, just to look how it works.

Found 3 issues:
- batmon.glade is inclluded with an absolute path, maybe should be relative.
- A small startscript "batmon" would be neat.
- You don't catch the window-close event:
If the window is closed, the script still runs.

I ran it in Icewm, where it runs as seperate window.
But also in JWM this might be an issue.
If JWM is restarted, does it still run? Did not try, just guessing.

Nice work, thanks for sharing

Mark

[brad_chuck]

Did you catch my edit of the of the GINS program on the dev forum? This is needed to make the background picture change. I added some code to the program so you can wright boolean properties. I think we can use GINS for a lot of stuff.

I will iron out the wrinkles in the program... You called it, I just wonted to get something out there...

[HairyWill]

Thank you. Batmon works on my thinkpad x30, but the battery lies about its charge level. I can run for an extra 20-30 minutes whilst the charge level is zero.

I've tried logging the voltage instead and this seems much more accurate. Now that I know that my motherboard shuts down at just under 9.2 volts. I presume that monitoring this instead would be dependent on the characteristics of a particular battery / motherboard.

Interestingly the voltage drop from about 90% charge down to 10% (reported to acpi) is fairly linear though it does accelerate after this. I wonder if this last 10% discharge is good or bad for my (li-on) battery.

[brad_chuck]

Yeah I had to do it that way because some laptops don't show voltage. In many I think it is one or the other not both. I only show mAh......


Post your changed script so others can see it and use it for themselves.

[HairyWill]

For those that are interested in using voltage to measure battery life, read on.

I wanted to investigate the discharge characteristics of my battery so I charged the battery up to full, disconnected the power, ran the following script and let the battery run flat, so that I had a record of the discharge. The script is customised to my ACPI setup on a Thinkpad X30 with a single battery on BAT0.

[debernardis]

I would like to control the polling frequency for batmon, and in particular reduce it significantly. This because I have collisions between the apm utility (I have changed batmon.sh to use apm instead than acpi) and the mouse driver, which reset my pointer for several seconds. In order to reduce the incidence of such collisions, I would set polling to 60 seconds or similar long periods. Is it possible? Thanks

[brad_chuck]

That's on my list. You can use the GINS version of batmon ( 0.1.0)

Just change the line that says

[HairyWill]

Brad
I gave this a go last night but have a few problems.

1 Do you use JWM? I can't get the tray to swallow it properly, could you post your swallow entry?

2 It took me a while to realise I needed to use the gins from gins-bradc.tar.gz though I've worked that out now.

<edit> I've removed a comment about not finding ac_adapter, I hadn't loaded the module. Doh!</edit>
Keep up the good work, being able to have full control from a shell script is really good.

For future addins maybe toggling processor speed, temperature and fan speed as well would be good. I know all this stuff exists already but it must be possible to save some space and do it the puppy way.

[brad_chuck]