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            | / |  battery-stats  | \ |
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Copyright (C) 2003 Karl E. Jørgensen <[email protected]>
Copyright (C) 2012 Kevin Funk <[email protected]>
    Licensed under the GNU General Public License v2
Copyright (C) 2015 F Zenke <[email protected]>
Copyright (C) 2016 Petter Reinholdtsen <[email protected]>

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.