Kindle 3 Battery Percentage

[WalkingDistance]

Hey, is there a way for the Kindle 3 to display its battery percentage? I've always found battery percentages much better than a bar.

[Piper_]

No. I agree it would be more informative than the little bar. It's usually enough for a general idea of when to charge, but it's not been much help when I've tried to analyze my battery usage scenarios.

[statethatiamin]

That's a good idea, I'm sure there's a way. I know where in the Kindle FS the scripts that check the battery state are and they convert it from minivolts to the battery meter. There is actually a script that uses the percentage battery to determine whether it should boot or update.

I think it would be really cool, too. I'll see what I can do!

[silasgreenback]

Originally Posted by WalkingDistance

Hey, is there a way for the Kindle 3 to display its battery percentage? I've always found battery percentages much better than a bar.

Duokan shows percentage.

[WalkingDistance]

Originally Posted by silasgreenback

Duokan shows percentage.

Ooo i didn't know that. Is there a way to isolate that part of Duokan and to make just a simple battery-percentage add-on?

[silasgreenback]

Originally Posted by WalkingDistance

Ooo i didn't know that. Is there a way to isolate that part of Duokan and to make just a simple battery-percentage add-on?

Not that I'm aware of...maybe someone will dream up some interface hacks for the K3 firmware.

Caveat: Duokan shows percentage in one of its menus. I don't recall which menu to access to see it, though it may be through the Aa options button.

I'd check but I've uninstalled Duokan mainly due to its spacing around apostrophes (that's = that 's) and the title bar always shows during reading. Hopefully those issues will be resolved in the next release, because otherwise, it's pretty sweet.

[WalkingDistance]

ooo I was hoping for something like a % next to the battery bar. That way, you can really find out how much battery you have whenever you want (without the hassle of leaving your current book)

[silasgreenback]

Originally Posted by WalkingDistance

ooo I was hoping for something like a % next to the battery bar. That way, you can really find out how much battery you have whenever you want (without the hassle of leaving your current book)

I don't think you'd have to leave the page you're on to see percentage, just hit the Aa (text options) button.

It may be a different button than that, but it's not in the settings pages and you don't need to go to the home screen to find it.

Hope that helps.

[statethatiamin]

I just thought of a really dirty hack to get the percentage
As I said, the Kindle checks the minivolts of the battery every once in a while, as a percentage, and updates the battery bar. So here's two cheap options..

1) A daemon/process thread that runs in the background can occasionally check the battery level and echo it into a file like "/mnt/us/documents/batterylevel.txt" so that you can check it while you're reading. That would be kindof cool because it could also echo other system information (uptime, mem) and even give you an estimate of how many minutes (or weeks) you have left based on your usage level

and 2) (the dirtiest of all)...
The name of your kindle is saved in the fs as plain text and it displays on the upper-left on your screen (mine says "Tony's Kindle". A daemon, like the one above, could occasionally change the name of the kindle to the battery level so it displays in lue of you Kindle's actual name.

I think I'm going to start working on that :P

[statethatiamin]

I found the command that the Kindle runs to check battery power as a percentage

"gasgauge-info -s"

try running this! its so cool!

I'm going to start writing a script to do the first option I was talking about, just as a proof of concept. I think I'll have it update every two minutes

UPDATE:
here's a proof of concept

============
#!/bin/sh

while [ 1 -eq 1 ]; do
retstring="System Information:\n\n"
retstring="$retstring \tBattery: `gasgauge-info -s`"
echo -e $retstring > /mnt/us/documents/SYSINFO
sleep 120
done
============

$ chmod a+x sysinfo.sh
$ ./sysinfo.sh &

[WalkingDistance]

Nice! keep it up! let's get this going! haha

[mobad]

While I won't claim to know how the Kindle judges what should be indexed and what has already been indexed, I have a feeling that a constantly updating file will probably trigger the indexer and would probably decrease your battery life.

A bit off topic but while looking for other interesting commands in the Kindle I found that arecord can record sound from the built in microphone (doesn't seem like anyone else has mentioned it.)

Just run "arecord -f dat test.wav" then "aplay -f dat test.wav" to try it out.

Anyway back on topic.
The method I'm going to use is text to speech as there are not any simple ways that I know of to display text on screen (One could use launchpad to do so possibly) and will need the launchpad program https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=97636

Install launchpad then create a file called percent.ini in the launchpad folder containing:

[Actions]
;; run TTS Percent
Shift P = !/mnt/us/launchpad/scripts/percent.sh TTS_Percent &

Next create a file called percent.sh in launchpad/scripts containing:

#!/bin/sh
say "The battery is at $(gasgauge-info -s)"

Now just chmod +x percent.sh.

Now just hit "Shift Shift P" whenever you want to hear the percentage remaining.

[kranu]

Originally Posted by mobad

While I won't claim to know how the Kindle judges what should be indexed and what has already been indexed, I have a feeling that a constantly updating file will probably trigger the indexer and would probably decrease your battery life.

A bit off topic but while looking for other interesting commands in the Kindle I found that arecord can record sound from the built in microphone (doesn't seem like anyone else has mentioned it.)

Just run "arecord -f dat test.wav" then "aplay -f dat test.wav" to try it out.

Anyway back on topic.
The method I'm going to use is text to speech as there are not any simple ways that I know of to display text on screen (One could use launchpad to do so possibly) and will need the launchpad program https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=97636

Install launchpad then create a file called percent.ini in the launchpad folder containing:

[Actions]
;; run TTS Percent
Shift P = !/mnt/us/launchpad/scripts/percent.sh TTS_Percent &

Next create a file called percent.sh in launchpad/scripts containing:

#!/bin/sh
say "..........$(gasgauge-info -s)"

The periods are there to wake up the sound card but I don't know if they actually do anything.

Now just chmod +x percent.sh.

Now just hit "Shift Shift P" whenever you want to hear the percentage remaining.

Yay this works quite well! =)

[event]

Originally Posted by statethatiamin

I just thought of a really dirty hack to get the percentage

and 2) (the dirtiest of all)...
The name of your kindle is saved in the fs as plain text (...)

Really neat idea, congratz!

[statethatiamin]

Originally Posted by mobad

While I won't claim to know how the Kindle judges what should be indexed and what has already been indexed, I have a feeling that a constantly updating file will probably trigger the indexer and would probably decrease your battery life.

Maybe, but that seems unlikely because "My Clippings" is constantly updating, too.
Actually, I didnt even think of that because I disabled my indexing, anyway