pi-battery-widget

** Our Kickstarter campaign has now finished, and we have completed shipping nearly a thousand units to all our backers!

We are live with an order form in case you missed our campaign or would like to order more units, or please check our website at https://www.theredreactor.com/ - and check out our reviews page at https://www.theredreactor.com/reviews/ **

But you can still see the story of our campaign journey on our Kickstarter page, which also shows customer comments and our technology updates.

The Red Reactor is designed to fit underneath your Raspberry Pi, leaving the 40-pin header free for all the sensors, displays and other gadgets that you want to use in your projects. With ultra-low stand-by power, and seamless transition even at high currents between the battery and external power, it ensures your data is safe and your design just keeps on working. A wide range of features enable you to quickly create a robust system, including accurate access to the battery voltage and current, simple ON button integration and RUN/RESET support, battery protection and carefully managed charging circuitry to maximise battery life.

This code has been forked from the pi-battery-widget status icon widget, with major design changes to support The Red Reactor Raspberry Pi UPS, including accurate battery life modelling for charging and discharging profiles.

⭐⭐⭐ WORKS on Raspberry Pi Bookworm 64-bit OS (with X11) ⭐⭐⭐
⭐⭐⭐ If you need Wayland support then please try out our new Wayland battery monitor ⭐⭐⭐

🥇Features Battery LOW warning and Battery EMPTY Auto-shutdown

Please visit https://github.com/Scally-H/RedReactor for more technical details and code examples.

Please visit https://www.theredreactor.com for Info, News and Reviews from our Kickstarter and pre-order backers!

The C code executes the python code to configure and the read the battery voltage and current via the INA219 I2C device, also allowing for the detection of charging, charging complete and no battery states.

Python code output format is

voltage(float) | current(float) 

4.142 | 1088.98

Features

• Updated for Bullseye and tested on Bookworm

• NEW: Battery LOW Warning Pop-up at 10%

• NEW: Auto shutdown 30 seconds after Battery EMPTY Warning Pop-up at 0% (2.9v)

• 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 (both for charging and discharging!)

• The display is updated every 5 seconds

• Logs all activities in ~/RedReactor_batteryLog.txt

• Log File shows instant and averaged readings, battery life and status
  chargingState = -1 is "no battery"
  chargingState = 0 is "discharging"
  chargingState = 1 is "charging"
  chargingState = 2 is "externally powered "
  

• Actual battery reading code is done in python script based on The Red Reactor configuration

The Red Reactor UPS for Raspberry Pi zero, Pi Model 2/3 and Pi Model 4!

Installation

The application assumes you already have python3 installed (usually the case on Raspberry Pi OS).
However, you also need to install the python INA219 library, as follows from a terminal window:

sudo pip3 install pi-ina219

• You can find more information about this library for your own code at https://github.com/chrisb2/pi_ina219 )
• Please note that for Pi Bookworm OS you'll need a few extra steps to install INA219, please see https://www.theredreactor.com/2023/11/05/pi-bookworm/

Please remember to enable the I2C bus under the Advanced Options of raspi-config or via the GUI, as documented in the Red Reactor instruction manual (you will need to reboot the Pi for this to take effect).

Then, type the following

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

Please check the install script output for errors. It has been tested on Raspberry Pi with Buster, and creates or updates the ~/.config/lxsession/LXDE-pi/autostart file.

Please adjust your chosen battery capacity by editing ~/.config/lxpanel/LXDE-pi/panels/redreactor.conf (given in mAh for total capacity)

When the widget is running, you can check for startup errors and battery information at ~/RedReactor_batterylog.txt

You can also run the python code directly to verify reading the battery info:

  python3 pi-battery-reader.py

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 hello@theredreactor if you have any feedback or problem with this repository. Your input is appreciated.

Reference

https://www.theredreactor.com
https://github.com/Scally-H/RedReactor
https://github.com/mezl/pi-battery-widget
https://github.com/linshuqin329/UPS-18650
https://github.com/rricharz/pi-top-battery-widget