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power-flow-indicator

Indicator that displays electric current and/or power consumption of the laptop battery.

This indicator is designed for Ubuntu Linux systems using Unity or any other desktop environment that is compatible with AppIndicators. Tested on Ubuntu 16.04.

Installation

You can either clone this repository to your local machine using git or simply download it as .zip archive and extract it in any arbitrary location on your computer. Just make sure that pwi_icon.png is in the same directory as the power-flow-indicator script file.

Additional requirements

The file power-flow-indicator is a Python script, so you need a Python 2 interpreter installed on your system, but that is already included on all Ubuntu releases by default. Further than that, it requires you to have the following additional packages installed:

• to be added

This can be done by running the command below:

sudo apt-get install PACKAGENAME

Optional steps

If you want to be able to run the script directly instead of passing it as argument to the python interpreter, you can make it executable by running the command below from inside the installation directory:

chmod +x power-flow-indicator

To be able to launch power-flow-indicator in the terminal from any working directory without having to specify the full path to it, you have to create a symlink to it inside one of the directories specified in your system's PATH environment variable (e.g. /usr/local/bin for all users - which needs sudo privileges to create the link - or ~/bin for the current user only). The command to run could look like this:

ln -s /PATH/TO/YOUR/INSTALLATION/DIRECTORY/power-flow-indicator ~/bin/power-flow-indiactor

Usage

Simply run it from the command-line like this (using the actual path it is located):

 python /PATH/TO/power-flow-indicator

Alternatively, if you completed the optional installation instructions, you can also only write:

power-flow-indicator

It is convenient to add it to your Startup Applications so that it will launch automatically each time you log into a Unity (or compatible desktop environment) session.

Advanced command syntax

usage: power-flow-indicator [-h] [-W | -A | -a | -f FORMAT]

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -W, --Watt            display power in Watt (W) with 2 decimals
  -A, --Ampere          display current in Ampere (A) with 3 decimals
  -a, --Milliampere     display current in Milliampere (mA)
  -f FORMAT, --format FORMAT
                        custom display format - see below...

FORMAT syntax:
    Use Python's "str.format()" syntax with named parameters.
    It looks basically like this:  {<NAME>:.<DECIMALS>f}
    <NAME> can be one of "W", "A" and "mA" and specifies the value you want.
    <DECIMALS> allows you to specify the number of decimals displayed.
    Here are the format strings of the default display options as example:
    -W :  "{W:.2f} W" ,    -A :  "{A:.3f} A" ,    -a :  "{mA:.0f} mA"