conky power usage script (Page 1 of 2)

Nice work! I have been meaning to have a play with my Conky set-up for a while, I give this a try when I do. Thanks for sharing!

This is annoying the crap out of me. I'm getting this error

marf@crunchbang-lappy:~/.config/CrunchBang$ ./conky_battery.py 
: No such file or directory

But, when I do cat /proc/acpi/battery/BAT0/state

here is my output

present:                 yes
capacity state:          ok
charging state:          discharging
present rate:            14695 mW
remaining capacity:      71920 mWh
present voltage:         12065 mV

so it'd definitely there.

I did chmod +x conky_batter.py
but that shouldn't give this "no file found" message.

Any Ideas?

@marf
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the command suppose to be

python conky_battery.py

Oh, I did not know that

Can I ask, is this only for laptops? you said it said "unavailable" if plugged in, but I'd like to see power watt usage levels on my desktop.

Cheers dude, I'll try that one out.

And an overal distrobution would be great, coz I'm using an older computer currently, mostly for ICS, and I'm gonna try and install it on a REALLY old comuter, so minimising electricity usage would be nice so I can justify it to my dad =P

the script is actually taken from powertop and just converted to python, so if powertop works this will as well. As far as I know it wont work on a desktop though(it pulls info from the battery to find power usage). Also the first pastebin of it is gone now and it looks like I cut part of it off in the second so I'm gonna have to fix it again, I'll post when its good.

Posted a C version here: http://crunchbanglinux.org/pastebin/101

Average times on my Dell Mini 9:
Python: Real 0.135s
C: Real 0.072s

Make and "install" with:
gcc -o batt battery.c
sudo cp batt /usr/bin/

Last edited by 1esproc (2009-01-20 06:36:24)

Nope, doesn't work properly on the Mini because of that, but I didn't have anything else with a battery in it to realistically test the time. Not sure if there's some other way to determine it

Got a version working now for machines that don't report rate(like the mini 9). Two issues with it though, one it doesn't seem like acpi updates remaining capacity very frequently so it won't update very often(about every 2 minutes it seems) and it depends a lot on the accuracy of conky running it every second so I can't vouch for it's accuracy. If you want a rough idea of your power usage over time with it though here it is http://crunchbanglinux.org/pastebin/105 . Download the script to /home/yourname/scripts/powerusage.py and chmod +x it, then add ${execi 1 /home/username/scripts/powerusage.py} to your conky config.

you have to let it run for a while, the first number reported will not be accurate because it takes your remaining capacity and stores it, then when the capacity changes it uses the difference divided by how long it took to change to figure out your power consumption. The battery, or acpi not sure which, only updates the remaining capacity every 2 minutes or so. You'll have to wait a minute or two from when you unplug it to get a reading.

edit: just noticed your running on a eee, thought you meant dell, they should report rate correctly, whats do you get from:

cat /proc/acpi/battery/BAT(it'll be 0 or 1 probably)/state

when it's unplugged.

Last edited by iggykoopa (2009-01-21 16:01:55)

Ok it looks like the eee doesn't report rate correctly either so it will have the slower reporting time(if rate is reported correctly it updates about every second). Was your battery almost dead when you ran that command? It's showing 60 mAh which is almost depleted, if it was supposed to be charged that may be part of the problem. If it was almost depleted then the script is working as designed, it has to gather the information on remaining capacity right after you unplug it, then the next time acpi updates the remaining capacity it makes some calculations from that, so it may take up to 2 minutes to update accurately. Heres an updated version that tells you if it's gathering data instead of just reporting 0.0 http://crunchbanglinux.org/pastebin/109 .

edit: I'm at work so couldn't test it, but it should run fine, if you get any errors let me know.

Last edited by iggykoopa (2009-01-23 15:10:35)