Battery Stats

Battery-stats is a simple utility for collecting statistics about the laptop battery charge. Basically it will query APM 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 "monitors" to show the current state of the battery; lots of other utilities already do this quite nicely.

This package uses APM; there is no support for ACPI - Yet.

Background

As a laptop user, I found myself with ageing batteries. And my 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.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.

Battery-stats knows nothing about electrochemical stuff going on inside batteries - hence it will not try to make any predictions whatsoever. But somebody with knowledge of batteries should be able to tell whether they are behaving OK.

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. So I wrote this.

License

battery-stats is released under the GNU General Public License, version 2.

Download

Under Debian GNU/Linux all you have to do is to add these lines to /etc/apt/sources.list (preferably near the end of the file):

deb     http://www.karl.jorgensen.com/debian stable main contrib 
deb-src http://www.karl.jorgensen.com/debian stable main contrib

and run:

# apt-get update

followed by:

# apt-get install package-name

Apt will take care of the download, dependencies etc.

If you prefer to download the files by hand (if you're not using Debian and apt, then you'll have to), then you can find them here. And you will have to resolve any dependencies and conflicts by hand too.

Bugs

If you (God Forbid!) find bugs in my software, then I would very much like to know about it:

• Read www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/bugs.html first. The author has stated things better than I could have hoped to.

• Email me a bug report.