====== Battery Monitor [stable] ====== === Your lightweight battery status monitor === Nur für Windows! Programmiert in C++ ohne weitere Library (außer Win-API) see [[http://www.ohloh.net/p/batmon]] ==== What is Battery Monitor? ==== Battery Monitor is a very small and lightweight tool, which shows your battery status always on top of your screen - but without bugging you! ==== What are the main features of Battery Monitor? ==== * Extremely lightweight - no frameworks needed, only one simple executable * Simple, not bothering interface * Free open source software * Automatic shutdown when running out of battery ==== Why is there no new release? Is this project abandoned? ==== No, but for now, I think Battery Monitor does exactly what it was intended to do, so I see no reason why there should be a newer release. If you have another opinion, don't wait contacting me (see at bottom of this page). ==== Why did you build in an automatic shutdown? ==== This feature was because of a missing feature in Windows XP. The problem is, that Windows has only a setting to shut down when less then 3% of battery charge remaining. As one of my laptops (an EEE-PC 901) has a very long battery lifetime (~7-9h), 3% can be up to 20 minutes. So I deactivated Windows automatic shutdown and use Battery Monitor instead. ==== Okay, give me some short usage information! ==== All right, using Battery Monitor is very simple: * Start the BatteryMonitor.exe * Now, Battery Monitor makes a small always-on-top window in the upper right corner of your desktop. it looks like this: {{:projekte:batmon:screen.png?nolink&100|}}. The text shows the remaining lifetime. * There are 3 different color schemes which could be interesting for you: - Green/Red: The battery is discharging, the ratio green/red shows you visually your batteries status. - Blue/Red: The battery is charging, the ratio is like green/red - Yellow: Battery Monitor has no information about your battery. Are you sure you have one? * Important feature: Battery Monitor stays on top of most windows but you can click through the window anyway! * Simultaneously, a tray icon is created: {{:projekte:batmon:screen2.png?nolink&100|}} This is your "control panel". * When performing a left-click on the tray icon, some additional information is shown. * //Important//: A double right-click on the tray icon closes battery monitor. * //Important///: Battery Monitor automatically shuts down when you are running out of battery (if lifetime is lower than 5 minutes.). If shutdown was initiated (you'll see a warning), you can stop it by running "shutdown -a". But don't forget to stop Battery Monitor or it will reinitalize shutdown ;)! Since V1.1 shutdown should be canceled automatically if you plug in A/C source. ==== How much does Battery Monitor cost and what are my rights/duties? ==== Battery Monitor is free software, "free as in speech" (licensed under a BSD-like license) and also "free as in beer". [[http://tornado.fa-satzger.de/batmon/license.txt|Full license text]]. ==== What are the requirements for Battery Monitor? ==== Battery Monitor only supports Windows, as Linux doesn't have such a lack of software ;). I could only try it on WinXP by now, but it should work on other Windows versions as well. ==== What did you use to build Battery Monitor ==== Only few things: MinGW GCC/G++ 4.5, MSys, windres, QMake w/ QTCreator IDE and Editra(Superseded: Netbeans IDE (C++)) and icons from the public domain Tango Icon Library. And of course a bunch of Windows API calls ;). For creating the documentation, Doxygen was used. ==== Don't bug me any longer - where do i get it? ==== Here you go: [[http://tornado.fa-satzger.de/batmon/bin.zip|Binaries]] [[http://tornado.fa-satzger.de/batmon/bin10.zip|Old Binaries (V1.0, better tested)]] ==== I've found a bug, whom should I tell? ==== Thats not possible...I'm perfect....but in case that....hmmm..... okay ;) You can write an email (see below). ==== I'm a developer, give me some more infos! ==== Okay, Battery Monitor only uses Windows API (and of course standard C/C++) features, the whole window management is done using API calls - as well as the query for every information Battery Monitor needs. The status update is done via windows messages using the windows internal timer. You can view the developer's [[http://tornado.fa-satzger.de/batmon/doc/html/|Documentation]](also available as [[http://tornado.fa-satzger.de/batmon/doc/doc.pdf|PDF File]]) or directly download the [[http://tornado.fa-satzger.de/batmon/src.zip|sources]]. They were built using MinGw-Gcc 4.5 with some additional command line parameters: -mwindows -enable-auto-import -static-libgcc -static-libstdc++ Furthermore, you have to (dynamically) link setupapi. With those command line options, you'll get a static linked MinGW Runtime, otherwise one would need to have some additional dll files. Before compiling, you should also run windres -i main.rc -o main.res -O coff to produce a resource file containing all needed icons and version info. Since V1.1, qmake was used as build environment, but it should be no big deal to compile w/o qmake (see annotations above). The .pro-file is included. [[http://tornado.fa-satzger.de/batmon/src10.zip|Old sources (V1.0, better tested)]] The whole project until V1.0 was done using the free Netbeans IDE, I packed the Netbeans project into the sources distribution so you can start right away. The documentation was done using doxygen. One last annotation: You can define a preprocessor constant named "DEBUG". This will cause Battery Monitor to show errors instead of simply ignoring them (be careful, this could be annoying...). ==== Links: ==== * [[http://qt.nokia.com/|QT Home (and also QMake home of course)]] * [[http://mingw.org/|MinGW/MSYS]] * [[http://tango.freedesktop.org/|Tango Icon Library]] * [[http://doxygen.org/|Doxygen]] * [[http://tornado.fa-satzger.de/batmon/license.txt|Battery Monitor License]] * [[http://tornado.fa-satzger.de/batmon/src.zip|Sources]] * [[http://tornado.fa-satzger.de/batmon/bin.zip|Binaries]] * [[http://tornado.fa-satzger.de/batmon/doc/html|HTML developer documentation]] * [[http://tornado.fa-satzger.de/batmon/doc/doc.pdf|PDF developer documentation]] * [[https://www.ohloh.net/p/batmon|Ohloh site]] * [[http://netbeans.org/|Netbeans]] Contact (german or english): [[:impressum_und_datenschutz|Kontakt]] ==== Changelog ==== * V1.1.0 (beta) * Cancelling automatic shutdown * V1.0 (stable) * first release * Basic features included: Tray icon, automatic shutdown, etc