Instructions

When you launch MiniBatteryLogger, it starts monitoring your laptop battery. The default view is the chart of the charge and amperage over time. Anyway, you will have to wait some time to see interesting stuff ;)

The chart view shows a graph of the charge of the battery and its amperage versus time. Additionally, a bubble icon will mark each power event: a change of power source, the beginning and end of charge, sleep and wakeup.

Monitoring sessions can be saved to disk for later analysis — by default, automatically. To manage past sessions, use the Sessions Browser, provided as a drawer. You can visualize a session just clicking on it, while the application will continue monitoring the battery in the background.

The Battery Inspector shows you all the available details about your battery: charge, amperage, voltage, capacity — current and maximum — time to empty when on battery power and time to full when charging; number of full cycles.

By default, the application changes its Dock icon to reflect the current conditions of the battery. You can also show a battery window on the Desktop if you want to see the status of the battery

Both icons change their color according to the current amount of charge, just like MiniBatteryStatus widget.

Statistics

MiniBatteryLogger keeps a record of your battery health stats. Every time the cycle count increases or the maximum capacity decreases, MiniBatteryLogger saves a “snapshot” of your battery, with date and an optional user comment — you can also create and delete snapshots manually, of course.

Snapshots let you evaluate the evolution of your battery performance along time, to detect malfunctioning or estimate the remaining battery life.

Comparison

By sharing your battery data, you are contributing to the Shared Battery Data Archive, a project to collect and organize Mac laptop battery data.

The Archive makes the Comparison feature possible. Have you ever wondered if your battery is “good” or compared to other batteries? Now with MiniBatteryLogger’s comparison tools you can compare your battery with all other batteries of the same kind in the Archive.

The Shared Battery Data Archive is also accessible through a nice web interface.

The Battery Log

MiniBatteryLogger logs to disk all relevant battery and power source events. The Log View shows the current log from the start of the current session. Every time an event is caught, a line is appended to the log. A search field lets you filter the lines of interest (e.g. when you’re just searching for the power chord disconnections, type “battery power”).

Preferences

Every user has different needs. MiniBatteryLogger lets you customize about every parameter involved in monitoring the battery and report of data.

The General pane lets you choose the time interval of active battery polling and to enable or disable the visualization of the battery status in the application’s Dock icon.

The Chart View pane lets you choose the colors to be used in the graph of charge over time.

From the Alerts pane you can customize the way MiniBatteryLogger warns you about critical events. You can choose the level of charge under which the application should issue a Low Battery notification, and the level of capacity under which a Battery Near Death warning should be issued.

You can choose to be notified either with Growl alerts or speech synthesized vocal alerts.

The Software Update pane lets you enable the automatic update check at startup. You can also see when the last update check has been performed. An additional button lets you immediately check if there is an available update.

Finally, the Sharing pane lets you configure the way MiniBatteryLogger will interact with the world. From the Shared Battery Data Archive settings box you can set up MiniBatteryLogger to automatically send your own data to the Archive and retrieve shared data for your computer model.

Battery data is sent to the Archive anonymously. No sensible information will be ever sent without your consent.

From the Data Sharing settings box you can also set up MiniBatteryLogger to look for shared batteries and to share your own data over the network.

You may also decide not to advertise the service with Bonjour or to require a password to access your data (currently not implemented).