blog/data/2016-05-23-battery-stats.txt

   1 Title: Discharge rate estimate in new battery statistics collector for Debian
   2 Tags: english, debian
   3 Date: 2016-05-23 09:30
   4 Publish: 2016-05-23 09:30
   5
   6 <p>Yesterday I updated the battery-stats package in Debian with a few
   7 patches sent to me by skilled and enterprising users.  There are a few
   8 user nice and visible changes.  First of all, both the desktop menu
   9 entries now work.  A design flaw in one of the script made it fail if
  10 no controlling TTY was available.  So the script worked when called
  11 from the command line, but not when called from the desktop menu.</p>
  12
  13 <p>The next new feature is a discharge rate estimator in one of the
  14 graphs (the one showing the last few hours).  It also got colors
  15 showing charging in blue and discharge in red.  The percentages of
  16 this graph is relative to last full charge, not battery design
  17 capacity.</p>
  18
  19 <p><img align="center" src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2016-05-23-battery-stats-history.png"/></p>
  20
  21 <p>The other graph show the entire history of the collected battery
  22 statistics, comparing it to the design capacity of the battery to see
  23 how the battery life time get shorter over time.  The red line in this
  24 graph is what the previous graph considers 100 percent:
  25
  26 <p><img align="center" src="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/images/2016-05-23-battery-stats-rate.png"/></p>
  27
  28 <p>You can see here that I only charge the battery to 80 percent of last
  29 full capacity, and how the capacity of the battery is shrinking. :(</p>
  30
  31 <p>The last new feature is in the collector, which now will handle more
  32 hardware models.  On some hardware, Linux power supply information is
  33 stored in /sys/class/power_supply/ACAD/, while the collector
  34 previously only looked in /sys/class/power_supply/AC/.  Now both are
  35 checked.</p>
  36
  37 <p>If you are interested in how your laptop battery is doing, please
  38 check out the
  39 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/battery-stats">battery-stats</a>
  40 in Debian unstable, or rebuild it on Jessie to get it working on
  41 Debian stable. :) The upstream source is available from
  42 <a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/battery-stats">github</a>.
  43 Patches are very welcome.</p>
  44
  45 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
  46 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
  47 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>