Is there any way to get notified when battery is full?

Question

I'm using Ubuntu 12.04 on a laptop, I was wondering if there is a way to get notified when the battery become full.

Answer 1

This feature was present on old gnome2, but mising from latest gnome.Gnome power manager is supposed to give notification when battery is full, but it doesn't(It could be a bug). I couldn't find any option with dconf either.To me it appears that the only way to achieve this through a cron job which regulary checks whether battery is full or not.

First open terminal & type ls /proc/acpi/battery/. In my case, the output is C241. Your could be different(generally batt0 ot batt1).Also check the type of ac adapter,ls /proc/acpi/ac_adapter. Its C240 for me. Open gedit & copy the following script.

Remember to replace C241 & C240 with your battery type & ac adapter.

#!/bin/bash

cd ~/.scripts
notification=$(grep 'notification:' notification|awk '{print $2}')

cd /proc/acpi/ac_adapter/C240;
power=$(grep 'state:' state|awk '{print $2}')
s1="$power"

s2="charged"
s3="on-line"
s4="on"

export DISPLAY=:0

if [ "$s1" = "on-line" ]; then
  cd /proc/acpi/battery/C241;
  state=$(grep 'charging state:' state|awk '{print $3}')
  if [ $state = $s2 ] && [ "$notification" = "$s4" ];
    then
            notify-send  --urgency=critical "Power Manager" "battery is full" -i battery_full
            echo "notification: off" >~/.scripts/notification

    fi

else
  if [ $notification != "on" ]; then
    echo "notification: on" >~/.scripts/notification
  fi
fi

save the file as batteryfull.sh at ~/.scripts (or anywhere you like). Make the file executable chmod a+x batteryfull.sh.

On terminal type echo "notification: on" >~/.scripts/notification. Also add the same line at the end of your ~/.profile.

Install gnome-schedule (sudo apt-get install gnome-schedule).Launch it, choose new task & select "a task that launches recuurently". On command section put full path of the script file.In my case its ~/.scripts/batteryfull.sh.You can set corn-job duration every min or every 5 min.click apply.You can check running jobs by typing crontab -l in terminal.

You can run this script at every boot by adding gnome-schedule as a startup application(may not be required in your case).

Note: This is probably not the perfect way to do this, but it works.So far this much i can do with my little knowledge with bash scripting.I will improve the script if i find something better.