notion-general

[Notion-general] Another battery level statusd script

[Eugen Z. <e.z...@gm...>]

Hello!

Recently I tried to find a script to display battery status in notion
statusbar and was frustrated because scripts in notion-contrib are too
outdated, unsupported and not working.

I considered this as challenge and tried to write my own script, which
should be (a) satisfactory for me (b) flexible enough to satisfy folks
who are using (probably ad-hoc patched) old scripts.

"Satisfactory for me" part mostly consists of indicator ability to be
both unnoticeable (hidden when battery is full) and attention-drawing
(blinking in addition to "critical" hint when battery level is too low).

"Satisfactoty for others" part supposes high flexibility of settings.
For example, the following config seems to make the script behave
*exactly* like default configured linuxbatt:

settings = {
  info_data = {'percentage'},
  info_format = "%.f",
  content_format = "%s",
  update_interval = 15 * 1000,
  bat_no = 0,
  thresholds = {
    full        = {0, 10, 30, 100},
    charging    = {0, 10, 30, 100},
    discharging = {0, 10, 30, 100},
  },
  blink_on_discharge = false,
}

If not all aspects are covered by settings at the moment, I would be
interested in gathering feature requests and upgrading the script.

Finaly, here is it:

https://github.com/ezag/notion-scripts/blob/master/statusd_battery.lua

It's my first experience with Lua, so I am very interested in receiving
reviews and getting feedback.

Thanks for your attention!

Re: [Notion-general] Another battery level statusd script

[Philipp H. <ph...@ph...>]

Hi,

sorry for not reacting to your message any earlier. 

Unfortunately it seems to be a bit more difficult to write a good battery 
script as there are several different conventions for the 
/sys/class/power_supply/BAT* directories. For example on my system there is no 
energy_now or energy_full file, which are the ones your script is trying to 
read (and the same comment also applies to your patch[1] to 
statusd_linuxbatt). Instead I have charge_now and charge_full files.  Some 
discussion[2] I've found via Google seems to indicate that there are even more 
possibilities and that they all use different units. The acpi program is able 
to handle these cases and so its source[3] is a good way to learn how to do 
this correctly. I don't know how other window managers handle this, but that 
might also be worth a look.

In the end, I don't feel like it is worth reimplementing all of this in Lua, 
but of course that's just my personal opinion. I've long ditched all the 
battery status indicators and now simply use the statusd_exec script to 
periodically execute acpi -b. In detail, my configuration looks as follows. In 
my template, I have an entry "%exec_acpi". In the 
"mod_statusbar.launch_statusd" table I then have the following entry.

exec = {
    acpi = {
        program = 'acpi -b | cut -d\' \' -f3- | tr "\n" " "',
        hint_regexp = {
            critical = '^Discharging, 1?[0-9]%%',
        },
        retry_delay = 5 * 1000,
    },
},

It gives me the current battery level in percent and the remaining time or the 
time until fully charged, depending on whether I'm on AC or not. And if the 
level is below 20 %, the output is colored in red.

I don't know if this would suit your needs. If you want greater flexibility, 
maybe adapting your script to retrieve the values from the acpi program 
instead of calculating them by hand might be a good solution? Including the 
remaining time would then certainly also be very interesting. What do you 
think?

Cheers,
Philipp

[1] http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&aid=3551479&group_id=314802&atid=1324530
[2] https://github.com/denilsonsa/batterymon-clone/pull/3
[3] http://paste.debian.net/189979