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Contributor kuzniarpawel

Support for Thinkad ultrabay batteries  
Written by kuzniarpawel the 2 Dec 08 at 06:47. Global category: Hardware support. New
Currently if you wish to have ultrabay battery visible in gnome-power-manager you must boot your laptop with this battery plugged in. That's because ACPI probes batteries only on early boot. This battery is only visible through tpsmapi, which is not supported in gpm.

Second issue is there is no way to automatically prevent the battery from full discharge, which shortens it's lifespan dramatically. Gnome-power-manager lets the battery to fully discharge and then switches for secondary(primary) battery. There should be way to define minimal charge threshold for all batteries.
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Solution #1: Auto-generated solution of idea #16130
Written by kuzniarpawel the 2 Dec 08 at 06:47.
Ubuntu Brainstorm was updated in January 2009. Since the idea #16130 was submitted before this update, its rationale and solution are not separated. Please vote accordingly, and if you have the necessary rights, please separate the rationale from the solution. Thanks!
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Solution #2: simple script
Written by kuzniarpawel the 16 Mar 09 at 06:40.
This simple script from forum.thinkpads.com forces to change battery when remaining charge is lower than 10%

# rolls to BAT0 when remaining capacity on BAT1 is less than 20%. Change .2 if wanted. Swap BAT0 and BAT1 if tp_smapi thinks the ultrabay is BAT0.
awk 'if (/remaining capacity/) left=$3; if (/last full capacity/) full=$4 END if ((left/full) < .2) system("echo 1 > /sys/devices/platform/smapi/BAT0/force_discharge")' /proc/acpi/battery/BAT1/*


Remember the script needs root in order to write to the files in /sys/devices/platform/smapi/BAT0,1/.

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