Mobile Battery Life Software Suggestions?

cajunjon asks: "I'm working on a project involving testing various laptops and their battery life and I'm trying to find a Win32 application that will accurately read the full voltage, charge capacity, cycle count, wear life and rated capacity information from the laptops of various manufacturers. Any suggestions?"

Comments

Google?

[Kithraya]

Is it just me, or is Ask Slashdot becoming a search engine for people too lazy to search on Google for themselves? Some questions are worth being posted to Ask Slashdot, but ones like this could easily be solved with a few minutes of searching.

Now, if the question were altered to read "After some searching, I've found applications A, B and C. Does anyone in the Slashdot crowd have experience with any of these, or have recommendations on which is the most accurate" I'd be more inclined to take it seriously.

Re:Google?

[mgahs]

Are you going to answer their question? Or are you going to bitch about people on Ask Slashdot.

Contribute, then you can complain. :)

How about BatteryMon:
(http://www.passmark.com/products/bat mon.htm)

"Windows program that allows the monitoring of laptop computer batteries and uninterruptible power supplies (UPS). Graphically see the battery charge / discharge rate, diagnose problem battery cells, compare your batteries performance with expected discharge rates and see the status of each individual battery pack (when multiple batteries are in use). More than 20 statistics are provided including voltage, chemistry and capacity."

Re:Google?

[Mike1024]

I'd second this, having used the software. Check out the screenshots:

http://www.passmark.com/products/batmon_screenshot .htm

it gives 'new' and 'now' capacity (mW hours), discharge rate and graph, anticipated time to fully discharge, and so on. Seems like exactly what the poster was looking for.

Michael

Can you trust the BIOS ?

[Anonymous Coward]

All those applications, whether in Windows or Linux,just read special BIOS functions to get their info.

How accurate is that ? Some batteries seem tolist a high charge for a while, then suddenly sink to zero. The little bars definitely aren't linearly related to remaining battery energy.

Re:Can you trust the BIOS ?

[bhtooefr]

Hmm... that would be a sign that there's bad cells that the controller THINKS works, but they don't.

It's not a BIOS issue, it's an issue inside the battery. The system is just reading the info that the battery passes it.

SMBus.

[TinheadNed]

The battery is always at the same SMBus address, and the same SMBus commands are used to read the number of charge cycles, current, voltage, required charging current and voltage, number of minutes of power left at current charge.

Read some SMBus specs.

Ann Landers ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is it just me, or are the Ask Slashdot comments becoming a forum for venting neurotic feelings towards fellow man that have no expected cure ? Some comments are worth being posted in Ask Slashdot, but ones like this could easily be solved with a click on the back button, or a swift boot to the head.

Now, if the comment were altered to read, "After some searching, I've found applications A, B and C. You might want to try those" I'd be inclined to take it more seriously.

Simpler

[spockvariant]

If you're not averse to making your life simpler:

1. Download and burn a Knoppix/Gentoo/Ubuntu live CD
2. Boot with it
3. cat /proc/acpi/battery/BATN/info to get the following info:

present: yes
design capacity: 53280 mWh
last full capacity: 51970 mWh
battery technology: rechargeable
design voltage: 11100 mV
design capacity warning: 3000 mWh
design capacity low: 1000 mWh
capacity granularity 1: 200 mWh
capacity granularity 2: 200 mWh
model number: DELL C26035
serial number: 15188
battery type: LION
OEM info: Sony

4. cat /proc/acpi/battery/BATN/state to get

present: yes
capacity state: ok
charging state: charged
present rate: unknown
remaining capacity: 53280 mWh
present voltage: 12536 mV

Here's a script that'll give you a charge/time profile that you can read using GNUPLOT (a free utility available on UNIX):
http://www.corewars.org/scripts/bat.pl

Re:Simpler

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, how about actually answering the question?

"full voltage, charge capacity, cycle count, wear life and rated capacity"

Cycle count? Wear life?

several Car Batteries and a hand truck.

[infonography]

You may need some simple DC/AC conversion and a few fuses to keep them from overloading.

Now, I didn't say it gonna be easy, but it is mobile and has a tremendous battery life.

Kidding aside here is a article that might help off the The Register

Unfortunately not for various manufacturers...

[the_ed_dawg]

Here's one for the IBM ThinkPad.

http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/documen t.do?lndocid=MIGR-44226/

Unfortunately, these kinds of applications are really hard to come by for Win32 (the above is the only one that I know). You may find that some laptops have vendor-supplied programs like Maximiser, but I believe the problem you have is that such an application simply doesn't exist. Your best bet really is to use a 2.6 Linux kernel and the /proc/acpi facilities. I'm not entirely sure about the cycle count, but I'm pretty sure it will give you the rest of the info you need. Just fire up a Knoppix CD and go to work... that is, unless you want to write a program that interfaces with Windows ACPI. :)

P.S. If you're going to do any kind of power management after you get this data, I'd highly suggest a distro with kpowersave (like SuSE 9.1 or better), which has a libpowersave library for managing devices. But as a warning, the source code was somewhat difficult to locate online (don't ask me why).

CPU Eat 'n' Cool

[cashew76]

This CPU Eat 'n' Cool windows app eats cpu cycles with a no-op style command. The operation saves cpu power quite a bit. If your interested in saving power, and running slower something along the lines of this app might work nicely. -Jefk

Re:CPU Eat 'n' Cool

[harrkev]

Those types of programs used to be potentially useful back in the Win9x days, but I thought that XP did that sort of thing by itself.

Just FYI: I used to use a program called "CPU Idle" back when I had my Pentium 120 laptop. My multimeter could not tell 10mA worth of difference on the AC plug when that program was running or not. I dumped it.

PS: Read my sig, then re-read your post.

Simple Approach

[Geccie]

Although all of the information you seek is useful and valid, the real question is how long the battery lasts. My solution simply charts the charge and discharge curves and predicts the time frames.

http://www.gecces.com/ look for the battery profiler.

geccie