Warn when battery is not being charged

[Kasper Dupont]

Binary package hint: gnome-power-manager

The Dell Latitude 13 (and possibly other models) have a key combination to disable charging of battery. This combination is easy to hit by accident when adjusting speaker volume. Currently there is no visible indication that this setting has been changed.

It would be a good idea if the battery indicator would some visible indication (maybe a red exclamation mark), if charging is disabled. And when hovering over the icon, there could be additional information that the key combination Fn+F2 can be used to turn charging on and off.

As far as I can tell the way to detect this situation is that "charging state" in /proc/acpi/battery/BAT0/state will say "charged", but "remaining capacity" will be much less than the full battery capacity.

ProblemType: Bug
Architecture: i386
Date: Wed Apr 27 22:44:39 2011
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 9.10
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 9.10 "Karmic Koala" - Release i386 (20091028.2)
Package: gnome-power-manager 2.28.1-0ubuntu1.3
ProcEnviron:
 PATH=(custom, user)
 LANG=en_DK.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.31-23.74-generic
SourcePackage: gnome-power-manager
Uname: Linux 2.6.31-23-generic i686

[Kasper Dupont (ubuntu-launchpad-feb)]

A bit of additional information. Here are what the pseudofiles in /proc/acpi/battery/BAT0 look like. As far as I can tell, the only way to tell the difference between the case where the battery is fully charged, and the case where it is not being charged, is from the "remaining capacity"

/proc/acpi/battery/BAT0/info

present: yes
design capacity: 2700 mAh
last full capacity: 2407 mAh
battery technology: rechargeable
design voltage: 11100 mV
design capacity warning: 270 mAh
design capacity low: 81 mAh
capacity granularity 1: 27 mAh
capacity granularity 2: 27 mAh
model number: DELL 449TX08
serial number: 756
battery type: RAM
OEM info: Sanyo

/proc/acpi/battery/BAT0/state

Fully charged:

present: yes
capacity state: ok
charging state: charged
present rate: 1 mA
remaining capacity: 2700 mAh
present voltage: 12473 mV

Charging:

present: yes
capacity state: ok
charging state: charging
present rate: 1880 mA
remaining capacity: 1463 mAh
present voltage: 11976 mV

Not charging:

present: yes
capacity state: ok
charging state: charged
present rate: 1 mA
remaining capacity: 1461 mAh
present voltage: 11723 mV