IBAM For Linux

IBAM (Intelligent BAttery Monitor) is an advanced battery monitor for laptops, which uses statistical and adaptive linear methods to provide accurate estimations of minutes of battery left or of the time needed until full recharge.

All currently available battery or apm monitors keep telling me that my laptop is able to run for 200 minutes (3h 20min) with fully charged batteries.

The reason for this is that the bios computes these inaccurate numbers from the "intelligent" batteries and the apmd just forwards this information to all applications. Even worse is that the last "bios" hour is only about 20 minutes in terms of our understanding of time.

IBAM solves this problem by creating a battery and charge profile (as seen on the right for my computer) from which it can compute the actual times remaining.

The red graph represents the battery cycle (where the laptop is running on battery), the x-axis represents the bios-minutes, the y-axis the actual average lengths of that minute in seconds.

As you can see the bios minute is about 50 seconds long from 200 minutes to 60 minutes, and only 10 seconds long from 40 minutes to 20 minutes. No wonder I was surprised that the battery was empty so soon... ;)

The green graph shows the charge cycle, which seems to be a bit more useful, still the same technique can be used to give the user an idea how long the charge process will need.

As soon you created initial profiles you can get the same graphs for your computer by using the option "--plot".

Of course the computer will consume more energy on a high load and IBAM does take this into account by determining a short-term linear adaptive method.