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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.

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6 Answers 6

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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.

Before: Before bluez Experimental option enabled, Cloud Walker bluetooth headset is not displayed in Devices section of Power settings

After: After bluez Experimental option enabled, Cloud Walker bluetooth headset is displayed in Devices section of Power settings

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  • 1
    Thanks, 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 from bluetoothctl 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!
    – Elijah Lynn
    Sep 7, 2022 at 21:58
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    Thanks. Works on Ubuntu as well
    – Amorphous
    Feb 2, 2023 at 12:09
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    Didn't work for me on Ubuntu 20.04.5 LTS with 5.15.0-58-generic kernel.
    – Paloha
    Feb 3, 2023 at 7:56
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    It works under Ubuntu 22.04
    – nelsonmau
    May 15, 2023 at 14:25
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    This 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!
    – AneesAhmed777
    May 21, 2023 at 20:39
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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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    Thank you for doing the job for the community
    – Rafik Farhad
    Oct 26, 2020 at 14:35
  • Thank you! Do you have print screens, just want to see how its looks like.
    – Qui-Gon Jinn
    Oct 28, 2020 at 4:25
  • @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%
    – Alireza S.N
    Oct 28, 2020 at 5:19
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    Using 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').
    – sancho.s ReinstateMonicaCellio
    Mar 30, 2021 at 8:01
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    Thank you for this. Worth adding that "bluetoothctl devices" shows the required MAC addresses
    – davidgo
    Jan 13, 2022 at 19:47
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In ubuntu you can go simply to settings->power to see the battery status of system and connected devices.

enter image description here

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

enter image description here

This is what: bluetoothctl devices shows:

enter image description here

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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    Unfortunately, I don't see the first section "Devices" on my machine. I've the same Ubuntu20.04.1 LTS.
    – Rajesh Chaudhary
    Dec 11, 2020 at 6:40
  • @Rajesh Chaudhary Can you run a upower -d and see what the output is ?
    – klaas
    Dec 11, 2020 at 22:25
  • Here you go @klaas pastebin.com/zskLJmtr
    – Rajesh Chaudhary
    Dec 13, 2020 at 13:28
  • 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 use bluetoothctl which open an internal cli. Enter deviceswhich should give a list of the connected devices. I add the outputs for my system in the answer above.
    – klaas
    Dec 17, 2020 at 11:58
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    Seems 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..."
    – klaas
    Dec 19, 2020 at 21:12
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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'
...

src reddit

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    It did not show the bluetooth device, just the ac adapter, laptop battery and displaydevice.
    – gabs1bb3
    Feb 27, 2020 at 7:30
  • @gabs1bb3 It shows.
    – Éderson T. Szlachta
    Jul 3, 2020 at 19:44
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    @ÉdersonT.Szlachta not always. My phone can show the battery status of my device but Ubuntu (18.04) can't.
    – Saren Tasciyan
    May 31, 2021 at 10:52
  • @gabs1bb3 Need to restart bluetooth daemon and reconnect the bluetooth device before upower method.
    – Akarsh Jain
    Mar 19, 2023 at 5:32
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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

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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
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