Back in September, I blogged about +the +system I wrote to collect statistics about my laptop battery, and +how it showed the decay and death of this battery (now replaced). I +created a simple deb package to handle the collection and graphing, +but did not want to upload it to Debian as there were already +a battery-stats +package in Debian that should do the same thing, and I did not see +a point of uploading a competing package when battery-stats could be +fixed instead. I reported a few bugs about its non-function, and +hoped someone would step in and fix it. But no-one did.
+ +I got tired of waiting a few days ago, and took matters in my own +hands. The end result is that I am now the new upstream developer of +battery stats (available from github) and part of the team maintaining +battery-stats in Debian, and the package in Debian unstable is finally +able to collect battery status using the /sys/class/power_supply/ +information provided by the Linux kernel. If you install the +battery-stats package from unstable now, you will be able to get a +graph of the current battery fill level, to get some idea about the +status of the battery. The source package build and work just fine in +Debian testing and stable (and probably oldstable too, but I have not +tested). The default graph you get for that system look like this:
+ +My plans for the future is to merge my old scripts into the +battery-stats package, as my old scripts collected a lot more details +about the battery. The scripts are merged into the upstream +battery-stats git repository already, but I am not convinced they work +yet, as I changed a lot of paths along the way. Will have to test a +bit more before I make a new release.
+ +I will also consider changing the file format slightly, as I +suspect the way I combine several values into one field might make it +impossible to know the type of the value when using it for processing +and graphing.
+ +If you would like I would like to keep an close eye on your laptop +battery, check out the battery-stats package in +Debian and +on +github. +I would love some help to improve the system further.
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