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Jeggy
Asked: 2014-10-05 07:28:38 +0800 CST

How to get a notification when computer is not charging?

  • 772

My laptop battery sucks, and lasts up to 5minutes without charging. Sometimes the charger falls out without me knowing, making the computer shut off unexpectedly.

Is there a way to get a notification the moment my charger falls out? not when battery needs to be charged like Ubuntu is used to do(Because that doesn't work for my laptop, and I've given up that idea)

power-management

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Simple linear command:

    [[ $(acpi -b | grep -o "Discharging") ]] && notify-send "Alert" "Battery is not charging.\n Please plug your AC adapter!"

    From man acpi we have:

    NAME
       acpi - Shows battery status and other ACPI information    
SYNOPSIS
       acpi [options]    
DESCRIPTION
       acpi Shows information from the /proc or the /sys filesystem, such as battery status or thermal information.    
OPTIONS
       -b | --battery
                 show battery information

    If you run acpi -b and you battery is charging mode, you will get this result of that:

    Battery 0: Charging, 88%, 00:38:17 until charged

    And if your battery isn't charging then the result would be like this:

    Battery 0: Discharging, 87%, 03:46:06 remaining

    Then We are looking "Discharging" in the result with this command:

    acpi -b | grep -o "Discharging"

    If battery was not in charging the result will "Discharging".

    And finally we send an alert to notification if we got "Discharging" from above command:

    [[ $(acpi -b | grep -o "Discharging") ]] && notify-send "Alert" "Battery is not charging.\n Please plug your AC adapter!"

    Note: [[ Something ]] always true and [[ ! Something ]] always false.

    Now it's easiest way that we run it in the background, inside a while loop. Then I put the command into a while loop and I check the battery status between X interval of time. Like this:

    while true
 do
    # Our command
    sleep [number of seconds] # check the status every [number of seconds] seconds
 done

    And if you want to run the script on startup and every 5 minutes, so the construction would be:

    • Save the script(I named it ChkCharge.sh in my home directory)
    • Add a line in /etc/rc.local to call your script (your ChkCharge.sh) + "&" to make it exit. like bash /home/USERNAME/ChkCharge.sh &.

    Final Script

    #!/bin/bash
while true
do
    [[ $(acpi -b | grep -o "Discharging") ]] && notify-send "Alert" "Battery is not charging.\n Please plug your AC adapter!"
    sleep 300 # 300 seconds or 5 minutes
done

    Finish. Reboot and see the magic ;)

    • 6

  2. This looks pretty simple, I'm not a bash script expert, but maybe could be useful for you

    # sh script.sh

    The script.sh content:

    #! /bin/bash

power=$(cat /sys/class/power_supply/BAT1/status)

while true; do
  actual=$(cat /sys/class/power_supply/BAT1/status)

  if [ $actual != $power ]; then
     power=$actual
     notify-send $actual
  fi
done

    Basically, I'm reading a file at sysfs that has information about your battery, there are more information in there that could be interesting. The file status contains a flag indicating if your device is actually Charging or Discharging. Hope that helps you.

    • 4