I have several battery operated devices - mainly locks, motion sensors and door sensors. What would be nice is an app that tracks when batteries are changed. This could be done my whenever the battery level increases to 100%, or possibly 90%.
I have a rule that alerts me when a battery drops below 35%, but some devices do not report battery level well. This week I discovered a lock has been dead for over a week, even though it showed 60%.
If I could keep track of battery changes, it would give me a better idea of which devices are battery hogs and maybe alert me when one is nearing it's end of life.
What about the community app "Device Activity Check" ? That checks for anything that hasn't been active for a time that you set. For example my window sensors report temperature etc several times a day so if they haven't done so for several hours it notifies me and I can assume the battery is flat (or it's fallen off the mesh)
The Device Activity Check is a good suggestion. But what I would really like is an app that outputs a table showing when a battery device had it's battery replaced (i.e. when the battery level reached 100%.
I use Device Activity Check to alert me when a device has stopped updating for over 24 hours. This helps to catch this case.
@krlaframboise's Simple Device Viewer is another simple to set up app that lets you see the battery state of all your devices. It has both a simple text view as well as a graphical view:
I just find the reported battery levels on most devices are just nowhere near anything accurate enough to be helpful. A combination of DAC and knowing when the battery was changed is probably going to be as accurate as it gets. I wonder if it's possible to write an app that can read from a table held in the file space, which has device name, date of new battery, and number of days old you want to be reminded to check it. Then when that time has elapsed on any device, the app sends a notification.
There are some custom drivers that do report a battery replaced date that can be reset using a button. So I suppose it is something that could be implemented but if this was to be done on all the system drivers it would be a mammoth task. I'm not sure this is something that would be implemented.
You could also use the Built-In notifications app to do some basic monitoring and alerting of battery levels. I predominantly use it to monitor battery levels for more predictable devices like tablets (reporting to HE using Tasker) and my Logitech keyboard and mouse (reporting to HE using my driver and third-party PC app).
I use the HE built in notifications app. Can add all devices to it. But you cant enter in the date changed unless you make a notification per device and put it in the text.
If you want to track battery type and battery change dates for batteries, two apps that @thebearmay recently released can help you with that. @terminal3 posted about the one used to write the data, and there is second app that you can use to read the data. They do require a manual processes but I find using them together very useful as well.
To write battery data to the device page:
To read/display battery data from the device page:
We could do with the ability to edit a file directly, so that the user can easily update the battery change dates and make changes to how many days before warning. Though the direct edit mode does carry risks of poor formatting breaking the app. More complicated to add all that to the app, but it's probably going to be the only way. Read lines into array, allow direct poking of fresh data into array via app, write out file again...
