Battery monitor tools?
I'm looking for a good battery charge/discharge profiler tool for my
Ubuntu laptop. I'm aware that there's the "Power History" tool, but it
doesn't seem to do what I'm after. I'll explain....
A couple of years ago, I came across a really neat tool for Windows for
estimating the time remaining until the battery is completely charged or
discharged. It was pretty clever about how it went about it. It would
constantly record things like: how much charge the battery said it still
had, how much the battery said it was charging/discharging at, etc. The
tool would use this info to estimate the time to charge/discharge...
/but/ it also went one step further. It could account for errors in the
battery's reporting. For example, if the battery reported that it had
80% charge left, and then, a few minutes later, reported that it had
just 20% left, then this tool would learn this, and realize that the
battery was old/problematic. So, the /next/ time the battery was
reporting 80% charge left, the tool would know not to give too
optimistic of an estimate for the remaining time. In other words, the
tool was learning what "80%" /really/ meant to that battery.
It also did something else which was really cool. Because the battery
drains at different rates depending upon what you're doing with your
laptop (ie, playing a DVD on a bright screen versus just reading some
text on a dimmer screen), this tool would actually show you "best case"
and "worst case" predictions of your remaining battery life (or time to
charge back up) based upon /actual/ discharge rates from /that level/ of
battery charge remaining that it had experienced on /that/ laptop. So,
you'd open up the little power-discharge graph tool and you'd see three
lines: a best, a worst, and one in-between which was what rate you're
currently at.
So, two questions:
1 - Does anyone know what tool that was? (Yes, I know this is a Linux
forum but, as long as I'm describing the tool, I figured I'd ask. It's
not the PassMark one. I thought it was called BatMon or something, but
now I can't find it anywhere).
2 - Does anybody know of a tool that does this in Linux? Or, is there
some way to get the Gnome power-history tool to show this kind of stuff?
- Joe
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