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https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/battery-stats

Log battery charge (battery-stats-collector), show gnuplot graphs (battery-graph)
https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/battery-stats

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Log battery charge (battery-stats-collector), show gnuplot graphs (battery-graph)

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README 

        

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    Copyright (C) 2003 Karl E. Jørgensen 

    Copyright (C) 2012 Kevin Funk 

        Licensed under the GNU General Public License v2

    Copyright (C) 2015 F Zenke 

    Copyright (C) 2016 Petter Reinholdtsen 



What is it?

===========

Battery-stats is a simple utility for collecting statistics about the

laptop battery charge.  Basically it will query ACPI at regular intervals

and write the results to a log file.



It also contains a simple plotting utility to show the battery charge over

time.



It does not (and will never) contain any graphical real-time "monitors" to

show the current state of the battery; lots of other utilities already do

this quite nicely.



Interpreting the Stats

======================

First of all, I have no delusions of being a battery expert.  This means

that I will not make any serious attempt at interpreting the stats.



What I know can be summed up as:



    When batteries age, they will take longer and longer to recharge, and

    will discharge quicker and quicker.



However, I suspect that the *shape* of the charge/discarge curves (and

the way the shape changes over several months) can tell something about the

battery health.  Ultimately, it should be possible to figure out when the

battery will wear out and need replacement.



Hopefully somebody with some electrochemical knowledge can fill in the

(large) gaps of my knowledge here - I promise to give credit where credit

is due.



Note that several sorts of bugs can result in incorrect statistics.  Such

bugs can be introduced in several ways:



*   There are different ways of measuring "how full" a battery is.

    Apparently, it can be measured by the charging current.  Such a

    measurement has to be "calibrated" with knowledge of the battery

    type (NiCad, LiIon etc), number of cells etc.



*   Buggy ACPI bios'es.



*   Buggy kernel ACPI.  This I have not yet encountered, but in theory

    it exists...   It is best to make sure that you actually have ACPI

    available from the kernel - and enabled at boot time.



*   Bugs in this software.  But that's really, really improbable ;-)



How this all started

====================

As a laptop user, I found myself with ageing batteries.  And my (buggy) APM

bios was far from accurate when it came to estimating how long I could run

before having to recharge.



I found other utilities out there that could help here - e.g.  ibam @

ibam.sourceforge.net.  These seem to work quite well with estimating how

long before the next recharge.  Short-term stuff.  But none of them could

tell me how the battery would perform over longer periods - weeks & months.

Even with this tool, I don't have much of an idea (!), but at least this

will make it possible for others to collect and interpret the statistics.



Besides, being a typical laptop user, I did not have a "feel" for how long

I *ought* to be able to go before a recharge - or how it had behaved in the

past.  I needed statistics, graphs, software and my name in lights.  So I

wrote this.



Getting it

==========

It is available for download at:

    https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/battery-stats



Compiling it

============

You will need:



* The sources

* CMake

* GNU make



Installing it

=============



Debian

------



Debian unstable and wheezy have a package available:



    apt-get install battery-stats



Installing from source

----------------------



-	Make sure that you have bash installed

-	Make sure that you have gnuplot installed (only needed if you

	actually want graphs)

-	$ cmake .; make install



To start the battery-stats-collector daemon at boot time, you will need to

set up an init script and the relevant links /etc/rc*.d directories.  This

is all ready out-of-the-box for the Debian distribution.



To access the graph plotter from the X desktop you will need to set up a

menu item or launcher to launch /usr/bin/battery-graph.  This is already

set up for the Debian distribution.



There are no provisions for stopping the log file from growing too much

(unless you are running ... yes! you guessed it: Debian GNU/Linux!).  Use

of logrotate is recommended.



Copyright

=========

Please see the COPYING file in this directory.



Bugs

====

None yet!



Please report any bugs you find to:

    https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/battery-stats



Bugs related to the debian package should be reported to:

    http://bugs.debian.org/battery-stats



Warranty

========

Sorry for the legalese blurb. Quick summary: "CMA" ...



    THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR

    IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY,

    FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT.  IN NO EVENT SHALL

    THE AUTHOR(S) OR ANY DISTRIBUTORS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER

    LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING

    FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER

    DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.