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Mobile Battery Life Software Suggestions?

Posted by Cliff on from the how-well-charged-are-ya dept.

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?"

1 of 15 comments (clear)

  1. Simpler by spockvariant · · Score: 5, Informative
    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