Question

6

How to get a notification when computer is not charging?

rated 0 times [ 6] [ 0] / answers: 1 / hits: 1960 / 1 Year ago, mon, march 6, 2023, 4:55:06

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)

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trousransla

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2 Years ago

answered 1 Year ago curatekill · Accepted Answer

Simple linear command:

[[ $(acpi -b | grep -o "Discharging") ]] && notify-send "Alert" "Battery is not charging.

 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.

 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.

 Please plug your AC adapter!"

    sleep 300 # 300 seconds or 5 minutes

done

Finish. Reboot and see the magic ;)