pi-battery-widget

I was looking a way to display battery icon with my Chinese 18650 battery pack. I found pi-top-battery-widget is what I am looking for. So I fork the code and adapted to display the UPS-18650 using I2C reading.

Instead reading the battery info directly in the c code, I choose using pi-battery-reader.py which I adapted from UPS-18650 sample code. This way make others much easier to using their own method to read battery info from other method(e.g I2C,SPI,USB,UART).

The C code which execute python code to read battery values. Python code out put format is

voltage(float) | capacity(int) | chargingState(int) 

5.2 | 89 | 1

chargingState = 0 is "discharging"
chargingState = 1 is "charging"
chargingState = 2 is "AC or Externally Powered "

Features

• Displays a battery widget on the desktop panel of the general Raspberry LXDE at the right side in the System Tray section.
• The green bar turns red if the battery charge left is below 10%, and yellow if the battery is charging.
• The time remaining is displayed as a tooltip
• The display is updated every 5 seconds
• Logs all activities in ~/batteryLog.txt
• Actuall battery reading code is done in python script, you can swap the script to read differet value

Chinese 18650 battery Pi UPS

Installation

Open a terminal and type the following

  cd
  cd Downloads
  git clone https://github.com/mezl/pi-battery-widget.git
  cd pi-battery-widget

Make sure GTK3.0 library is installed:

sudo apt install libgtk-3-dev

Compile the code with the following commands:

  make

Finally install the widget with the following commands:

  chmod +x install
  ./install 

Reboot your pi.

To update the widget to the latest version

Open a terminal and type

  cd
  cd Downloads/pi-battery-widget
  git pull
  make

Now install the updated widget

  chmod +x install
  ./install

To uninstall the widget

Open a terminal and type

  cd
  cd Downloads/pi-battery-widget
  chmod +x uninstall
  ./uninstall

Please open an issue in this repository or write to [email protected] if you have any feedback or problem with this repository. Your input is appreciated.

Reference

https://github.com/linshuqin329/UPS-18650
https://github.com/rricharz/pi-top-battery-widget