Netbook Battery Setup

Occasionally the netbook battery monitor will be looking in the wrong place for the netbook battery monitor information. Usually its a case of having multiple batteries - or your kernel is using a different standard to expose battery information (it changed between 2.6 and 3.0). If it's not working for you, delve into /proc/acpi/battery (<= kernel 2.6) or /sys/class/power_supply/ (kernels 3.0+) on your netbook and determine what batteries are listed there (usuallyl BAT0 or BAT1).

Configuration

The instructions differ depending on whether you have are using debs, or building from source. In both cases, the software currently uses environment variables to determine the hardware configuration.

Deb Installation

Export the following variables before/after you source setup.bash.

> export TURTLEBOT_BATTERY=/proc/acpi/battery/BAT1

Putting it in ~/.bashrc or appended to your own workspace's setup.sh are good candidates for convenience.

Source Installation

Export the following variables into your workspace setup script.

> echo "export TURTLEBOT_BATTERY=/proc/acpi/battery/BAT1" >> ~/turtlebot/devel/setup.sh
> source ~/turtlebot/devel/setup.bash

Notes

You can see exactly how this is working in turtlebot_bringup/launch/minimal.launch.