How much power is your laptop using?
Products like Kill-A-Watt show how much power appliances are using. It’s good way to measure your computer’s power consumption — when it’s plugged in. But what if I want to know how much power my laptop is using when I’m not plugged in?
Turns out it’s fairly easy to get battery info. Running cat /proc/acpi/battery/BAT0/state
should return the current discharge rate and total battery capacity.
The trouble is that the “current rate” field sometimes switches between mW and mA. I have no idea why this is the case. Oh well, we can easily convert mA to mW with the formula: $latex watts = amps times volts $.
The end result is this conky friendly bash script:
[bash]
#!/usr/bin/env bash
# Print the current power consumption in watts.
# The script pulls the power consumption info
# from /proc/acpi/battery/BAT0/state
#
# Usage: power.sh [battery_num]
#
# Add to conky:
# ${execi 10 ~/conkyscripts/power.sh 0}
#
# Default is BAT0
BATTERY=0
if [ $1 ]; then
BATTERY=$1
fi
# Sometimes the "present rate" is returned in milliwatts,
# but sometimes it is in milliamps. If it’s in milliwatts,
# we just convert to watts and return. Otherwise we
# convert to watts with the formula:
# Watts = Amps * Volts
UNIT=`cat /proc/acpi/battery/BAT$BATTERY/state |
grep "present rate:" | awk ‘{ print $(NF) }’`
if [ $UNIT == "mW" ]; then
MILLI_WATTS=`cat /proc/acpi/battery/BAT$BATTERY/state |
grep "present rate:" | awk ‘{ print $(NF-1) }’`
e cho $[ $MILLI_WATTS / 1000 ].$[ ($MILLI_WATTS % 1000) / 100 ]
else
MILLI_AMPS=`cat /proc/acpi/battery/BAT$BATTERY/state |
grep "present rate:" | awk ‘{ print $(NF-1) }’`
MILLI_VOLTS=`cat /proc/acpi/battery/BAT$BATTERY/state |
grep "present voltage:" | awk ‘{ print $(NF-1) }’`
POWER=$[$MILLI_AMPS * $MILLI_VOLTS]
echo $[ $POWER / 1000000 ].$[ ($POWER % 1000000) / 100000 ]
fi
[/bash]
this is awesome, I might try and use this to evaluate an efficiency curve of monitors over their brightness settings. Also Ill ask an EE friend if he knows why that is switching between mA and mW