Oops, completely missed posting last weekend, mostly just because I'm too easily distracted. Such is life, hopefully I'll do two or three posts this weekend to even it up.
This is a simple script I wrote to notify me whenever my battery is running
low on power. Basically to use it you just create a new shell script with the
following in it and then run it using bash ~/bin/battery_monitor.sh &
in your .xinitrc script. This should then check your battery status every minute
and if it's below ten minutes remaining it will produce a warning message, after
generating a warning it will wait five minutes before checking again to make
sure it doesn't get really annoying.
#!/bin/bash
# Simple shell script that runs as a daemon to check the status of a Laptops
# battery and produce an error message every five minutes if it get's to
# less than 10 minutes of charge remaining and is not plugged in.
# Copyright (c) 2009, Timothy Pollard
#
# Redistribution and use with or without modification, are permitted provided
# that the above Copyright notification remains complete.
# The file that contains the state of the Battery
PROC_FILE=/proc/acpi/battery/BAT1/state
while true; do
# Get the charging state from the PROC_FILE, this should be one of "charged",
# "charging", or "discharging"
CHARGING_STATE=$(cat $PROC_FILE | grep "^charging state:" | sed -e "s/charging state: *//g")
if [ $CHARGING_STATE == "discharging" ]; then
# Get the current rate and remaining capacity
CURRENT_RATE=$(cat $PROC_FILE | grep "^present rate:" | sed -e "s/present rate: *//g" -e "s/ mW//g")
REMAINING_CAPACITY=$(cat $PROC_FILE | grep "^remaining capacity:" | sed -e "s/remaining capacity: *//g" -e "s/ mWh//g")
# Remaining battery life in minutes
REMAINING_TIME=$(echo "scale=4; $REMAINING_CAPACITY/$CURRENT_RATE*60" | bc | sed -e "s/\..*//g")
if [ $REMAINING_TIME -lt 10 ]; then
xmessage -center "There are currently only $REMAINING_TIME minutes of battery life remaining."
# Sleep for 4 minutes (4*60=240), this combined with the default
# sleep of 60 seconds assures that you are only alerted once every 5
# minutes
sleep 240
fi
fi
# Delay the next run for 60 seconds
sleep 60
done
# Simple shell script that runs as a daemon to check the status of a Laptops
# battery and produce an error message every five minutes if it get's to
# less than 10 minutes of charge remaining and is not plugged in.
# Copyright (c) 2009, Timothy Pollard
#
# Redistribution and use with or without modification, are permitted provided
# that the above Copyright notification remains complete.
# The file that contains the state of the Battery
PROC_FILE=/proc/acpi/battery/BAT1/state
while true; do
# Get the charging state from the PROC_FILE, this should be one of "charged",
# "charging", or "discharging"
CHARGING_STATE=$(cat $PROC_FILE | grep "^charging state:" | sed -e "s/charging state: *//g")
if [ $CHARGING_STATE == "discharging" ]; then
# Get the current rate and remaining capacity
CURRENT_RATE=$(cat $PROC_FILE | grep "^present rate:" | sed -e "s/present rate: *//g" -e "s/ mW//g")
REMAINING_CAPACITY=$(cat $PROC_FILE | grep "^remaining capacity:" | sed -e "s/remaining capacity: *//g" -e "s/ mWh//g")
# Remaining battery life in minutes
REMAINING_TIME=$(echo "scale=4; $REMAINING_CAPACITY/$CURRENT_RATE*60" | bc | sed -e "s/\..*//g")
if [ $REMAINING_TIME -lt 10 ]; then
xmessage -center "There are currently only $REMAINING_TIME minutes of battery life remaining."
# Sleep for 4 minutes (4*60=240), this combined with the default
# sleep of 60 seconds assures that you are only alerted once every 5
# minutes
sleep 240
fi
fi
# Delay the next run for 60 seconds
sleep 60
done
