A battery protector for mobile computers

Continuing to use your computer when the battery charge is critically low could lead to serious damage to the battery. You may never face this issue while using operating systems like Windows, macOS, or even "ready-to-use" Linux distributions like Ubuntu and Fedora. However, for minimal setups like Arch, Void, and similar distributions, you may have to be careful about the battery charge as there's mostly nothing in place to take care of it on your behalf.

power-guard provides a simple command to fill in the gap by keeping a watch over the remaining battery charge and automatically suspending (or hibernating) your system to protect your battery from damage. You may also run it as a service with supported init systems.

power-guard usually prefers suspend over hibernate, but performs the latter when there is more than one battery equipped. This could be handy in the absence of charging points nearby and the user can quickly swap the discharged battery with a charged one and resume working without turning the computer off.

There are a few different ways to get power-guard.

# Clone project to the local workspace
git clone https://github.com/myTerminal/power-guard.git

# Switch to the project directory
cd power-guard

# Install with `make`
make install

power-guard will soon be available to install from your operating system's package manager.

A simple way to use power-guard is to run it in a command-line terminal with no command arguments.

power-guard

By default, it watches the remaining charge on the battery and suspends (or hibernates) the computer when it drops below 10%. You can also optionally specify the minimum threshold percentage of charge as an argument.

power-guard 7

The above example only suspends the computer when the remaining charge is below 7%.

power-guard can also be run as an init service, and currently only supports Runit. Support for more init systems will be implemented soon.

To learn more about usage, refer to manpage:

man power-guard

In order to update power-guard, simply run:

power-guard-update

In order to uninstall power-guard, simply run:

power-guard-uninstall

Being written with Common Lisp, power-guard depends on SBCL. In most cases, it will be automatically installed while generating the binary, but if it doesn't please install it before running the installation.

The other required programs are as follows:

• find
• cat
• command

Below are a few more optional dependencies that are also attempted to be fetched during the installation:

• beep
• notify-send

If not installed automatically, you may install them manually.

• Improve reading of battery level, add support for more hardware types
• Implement alternate methods of suspending the system
• Add support for more init systems like OpenRC, SysVinit, etc.