Is it possible to get the battery status of Bluetooth headphones connected to Linux? Android shows it so I was wondering if it was possible.
6 Answers
I am not sure about the state under Ubuntu, but under Arch Linux you do not need to write your own scripts to get bluetooth battery information nowadays.
The bluez package has experimental support for querying bluetooth headset battery data. Simply enable experimental features by editing
/etc/bluetooth/main.conf
and adding the following line to the [General]
section
Experimental = true
Then, you just need to restart the bluetooth service using
systemctl restart bluetooth
Reconnect to your device, and
bluetoothctl info
should now also show the battery status. e.g.
Device 28:11:A5:47:6C:6E (public)
Name: Cloud Walker
Alias: Cloud Walker
Class: 0x00240418
Icon: audio-headphones
Paired: yes
...
Battery Percentage: 0x3c (60)
The solution using upower as given by danjjl should also work now.
And now the battery level percentage should show up in Gnome Power settings dialog as well.
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1Thanks, just got this working on Arch thanks to your answer! It also gets it showing in the Power settings UI for Gnome too! Ubuntu must have enabled the Experimental bit in their upstream of
bluez
. I just added some UI screenshots as well as example output frombluetoothctl info
. Oddly though,bluetoothctl info
only shows one device, e.g. not my MX Master mouse battery as well. I'm looking forward to these battery levels showing natively in the system tray settings dropdown too! Sep 7, 2022 at 21:58 -
1
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1Didn't work for me on Ubuntu 20.04.5 LTS with 5.15.0-58-generic kernel.– PalohaFeb 3, 2023 at 7:56
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4
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2This approach of enabling experimental features works great. However, this specific method of editing the
/etc/bluetooth/main.conf
does not work for me, at all. The method that does work is editing the/lib/systemd/system/bluetooth.service
to add--experimental
flag, as can be seen in the docs. Cheers! May 21, 2023 at 20:39
I wrote a simple python script that does the job. It uses AT commands to communicate with the device via RFCOMM and prints the battery level if the device is supported.
https://github.com/TheWeirdDev/Bluetooth_Headset_Battery_Level
(You need Python 3.6.0 or newer to run the script)
It might not work with all bluetooth headsets but I've provided a couple of workarounds in the 'Issues' page that might help.
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3
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Thank you! Do you have print screens, just want to see how its looks like. Oct 28, 2020 at 4:25
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@Qui-GonJinn it's a command line tool. It simply prints the battery level, for example something like this: Battery level for XX:YY:ZZ:AA:BB:CC is 80% Oct 28, 2020 at 5:19
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1Using port
.2
I get<MAC adress> is offline (16, 'Device or resource busy')
. Using other ports I get<MAC adress> is offline (111, 'Connection refused')
. Mar 30, 2021 at 8:01 -
1Thank you for this. Worth adding that "bluetoothctl devices" shows the required MAC addresses– davidgoJan 13, 2022 at 19:47
In ubuntu you can go simply to settings->power
to see the battery status of system and connected devices.
Yes, I know it's a Microsoft Bluetooth mouse on a Linux System ... but hey, Microsoft is the new cool company now ;)
This is what: systemctl status bluetooth
This is what: bluetoothctl
devices shows:
The JBL was disconnected and the Creative speaker is connected with power. So the resulting ones with batteries (Keychron and Mouse) show up in the settings->power
dialog.
NOTE:
If upower -d
not show the device, It's power level may not display in settings .
// I had a mouse shown, but a headphone not.
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2Unfortunately, I don't see the first section "Devices" on my machine. I've the same Ubuntu20.04.1 LTS. Dec 11, 2020 at 6:40
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@Rajesh Chaudhary Can you run a
upower -d
and see what the output is ?– klaasDec 11, 2020 at 22:25 -
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Hmm, seems you don't have any connected devices. Probably a last check if BT stack is running. You can check it with
systemctl status bluetooth
Which should state loaded and active. If that is the case you can usebluetoothctl
which open an internal cli. Enterdevices
which should give a list of the connected devices. I add the outputs for my system in the answer above.– klaasDec 17, 2020 at 11:58 -
3Seems to be dependent on the device. I found the issue and comment from the maintainer below in the gnome.org gitlab issues Source,see here: Quote: ".. the device needs to show up in the output of upower -d to show up in the Power Settings panel (whether that's a laptop or a desktop). Right now, this means only devices which export their battery status in the kernel, and Bluetooth LE devices which export the battery via the BATT profile are supported..."– klaasDec 19, 2020 at 21:12
upower
can be used from a terminal to list power devices, listening to device events and querying history and statistics.
If your device is listed by upower -e
you can run upower --dump
to retrieve the battery level of your device.
Here is a sample output:
$ upower --dump
...
Device: /org/freedesktop/UPower/devices/mouse_dev_C1_FC_26_13_A9_58
native-path: /org/bluez/hci0/dev_C1_FC_26_13_A9_58
model: MX Anywhere 2S
serial: C1:FC:26:13:A9:58
power supply: no
updated: Wed 31 Dec 1969 06:00:00 PM CST (1550719462 seconds ago)
has history: yes
has statistics: no
mouse
present: yes
rechargeable: no
state: unknown
warning-level: none
percentage: 50%
icon-name: 'battery-missing-symbolic'
...
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22It did not show the bluetooth device, just the ac adapter, laptop battery and displaydevice.– gabs1bb3Feb 27, 2020 at 7:30
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1@ÉdersonT.Szlachta not always. My phone can show the battery status of my device but Ubuntu (18.04) can't. May 31, 2021 at 10:52
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@gabs1bb3 Need to restart bluetooth daemon and reconnect the bluetooth device before upower method. Mar 19, 2023 at 5:32
I have developed a GUI application to get the battery level of a bluetooth headset. You can check it on: https://github.com/Coutj/Bluetooth_project.git
For Airpods devices download and run https://github.com/delphiki/AirStatus with:
git clone [email protected]:delphiki/AirStatus.git
cd AirStatus
pip3 install bleak
python3 main.py