Battery Capacity?

[#1]

Hello,

2 Questions:

1) In JSS, for each computer, there is a entry called "Battery Capacity" -- what exactly is this? It shows any where from 98% - 109%

2) Is there anywhere that it collects "Cycle count" for the installed battery?

Thanks
----------
Brad Rellinger
Technology Specialist
Anthony Wayne Schools K-12
aw_aca_bre at nwoca.org

[dustydorey]

I started working on a script to grab that information but haven't had
time to get back to it. If you're really interested as far as I got
was that you can access system profiler via the command line and you can
grep and awk for that information pretty easily that way. I was just
trying to work out how I was going to output that data. Might at least
give you a place to start.

-Dusty-

Dustin Dorey

Technology Support Cluster Specialist

ISD 196 Apple Valley, Eagan, Rosemount

dustin.dorey at district196.org

952|423|7971

[tlarkin]

I think this should be a feature request for recon. In terminal if you
run jamf help recon you get a list of all the recon switches you can run
on a machine. There are switches to skip applications and fonts and
unix apps and what not, but there is no switch to run hardware report
only. If you look at a machine in inventory in the JSS it does in fact
list battery capacity.

So, I say make it a feature request to use Recon to run such custom
reports and then say output it to an HTML file or XML, which it looks
like you can already output such things to file but when I played with
the command a few minutes ago i was unable to get it to save to my
desktop. My syntax was probably wrong but it did not kick off any
errors.

As for Dustin's suggestion it will work using system_profiler binary
from the command line. I can never ever get awk to work right for me so
I would either grep it or use sed. I think I was helping an Apple SE
write a script for battery capacity last year for a smaller school but I
can't recall the outcome of it.

---

Thomas Larkin
TIS Department
KCKPS USD500
tlarki at kckps.org
blackberry: 913-449-7589
office: 913-627-0351

[milesleacy]

This is completely conjecture, and maybe one of the JAMF guys can chime in
on this, but I believe that "battery capacity" is the difference between the
Apple-advertised full-charge mAh and the current actual full-charge mAh of
the battery, expressed as a percentage.

I think the feature request would be to add fields for the following to the
JSS database:

Charge remaining (mAh)
Charging [probably not necessary]
Full charge capacity (mAh)
Cycle count
Condition

With these data in the database and selectable in an advanced search on
inventory, this would solve the need, no?

Battery capacity is already a smart group criterion, so you could have a
smart group that will notify you when a battery drops below a capacity
threshold you're comfortable with.

----------
Miles A. Leacy IV

? Certified System Administrator
? Certified Trainer
Certified Casper Administrator
----------
voice: 1-347-277-7321
miles.leacy at themacadmin.com
www.themacadmin.com

[#5]

Hello everyone! I saw this thread and I thought I would drop in on it. A few weeks ago I wrote a few scripts, one set that reports battery cycle count and the another that reports the battery charge capacity. The two sets are as follows:

BattCyclesRcpt.sh & BattCapRcpt.sh
These two scripts create dummy receipts in the form of:
Battery.CycleCount.x
Battery.ChargeCapacity.y

Where where x is the Battery's cycle count, and where y is the battery's charge capacity. The down side to using receipts is that x and y are going to be variable therefore there will be no way to efficiently search or scope policies to these values.

BattCyclesRecon.sh & BattCapRecon.sh
These two scripts set a recon field to an appropriate value. The following available fields can be set:
-realname The Real Name of the primary user
-email The email address of the primary user
-position The Position (Job Title) of the primary user
-building The text representation of a Building in the JSS
-department The text representation of a Department in the JSS
-phone The Phone number of the primary user
-room The Room that the computer is in

Instructions on how to specify which recon fields the battery data is stored in are within the headers of the scripts. As for searching, depending upon the field you use, you will be able to do a bit more compared to the first set; however, you will not be able to perform a range search.

Now, for the expected disclaimer: these scripts, while they may make it to the Resource Kit at some point, are explicitly NOT supported. Use at your own risk, and all. :)

Hope that helps!

Erin Johnson
Support Specialist

erin.johnson at jamfsoftware.com
....................................................................
JAMF Software
1011 Washington Ave. S
Suite 350
Minneapolis, MN 55415
....................................................................
Office: (612) 605-6625
Facsimile: (612) 332-9054
....................................................................
US Support: (612) 216-1296
....................................................................
http://www.jamfsoftware.com

[#6]

Thanks Erin.
----------
Brad Rellinger
Technology Specialist
Anthony Wayne Schools K-12
aw_aca_bre at nwoca.org

[#7]

Brad,

If you don't mind adding a third-party tool, there's a command line
application called batterystat 1.1
(http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/27793) that's pretty good at
monitoring battery conditions (including cycle counts). It provided some
helpful evidence when I was getting some bad cells from a third-party vendor
for my personal laptop.

Ric

--
Ric Getter
Portland Community College/Sylvania
Coordinator, Computer Resource Center
(503)977-8036