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

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.

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: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

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).