Build real-time battery drain warnings using Tasker – Android customization

Last week on our Android customization series we took a somewhat confusing and in-depth look at storing battery data at various points throughout the day. While that was a great tool for capturing long term battery statistics, we are going for something a little more immediate this week, using Tasker to build warnings to notify us when our battery is draining too quickly.

The idea is simple, seeing long term battery stats is great, but we really want a real-time warning system, something that pops up and says “hey, your battery is draining too fast!”

Before we get started

Tasker – Google Play StoreIf you’ve been following this series for any length of time, you’ve already got Tasker installed and you can move on to the next part of this tutorial. If not, I’d like to welcome you to the wonderful world of serious Android device customization. Tasker is $2.99 in the Google Play Store. Check out some of our other tutorials if you are debating the value, or just take my word for it, Tasker is a little tough to learn, but you get out of it what you put in, it is now the first app I install on a new Android device.

Real-time battery drain warnings using Tasker

Let’s walk through the approach to this project with a bit more detail. Unless you have a brand new device, I am sure you have an idea of just how long your battery typically lasts on your Android phone or tablet. You might be used to an average of about 3-4 hours of screen-on time for a phone, 4-5 hours for a tablet, but no matter what it is, you’ll need to take note of that number before anything else.

The project is actually really simple, as an overview, if you expect your battery to last a minimum of 5 hours, but it is draining at a rate that would kill it in, say, 4 hours, we simply throw up a warning, alarm, notification or something of that sort. There are a few ways this can be done, for today, we’ll do it by tracking the amount of time in between each 1% drain in your battery.

Some math to get started

As mentioned, you need to have an idea of what amount of time your battery should last, for this, go with the amount of time it will last with the display turned on. I’ll build my project based on 3 hours of screen-on time.

What we need to proceed is to figure out how many seconds each 1% of your battery should last. Luckily, there are 100 percentage points in everyone’s battery, so the math is more about converting time than anything. Our math goes as follows, 3 hours is 180 minutes, which is 10,800 seconds. Divide that by my 100 percentage points and we get that each 1% of my battery should last at least 108 seconds.

Is that easy enough to understand? All we will be doing is watching the time between battery level changes, if it drops 1% in less than 108 seconds, the battery is draining too fast for our liking. And if it lasts for more than 108 seconds, all is well. No warnings required.

Let me give you a few numbers, save you some work: 3 hours screen-on is worth 108 seconds. 2.5 hours is worth 90 seconds. 3.5 hours is worth 126 seconds. 4 hours is worth 144 seconds. 4.5 hours is worth 162 seconds. And 5 hours is worth 180 seconds. Any other values and you’ll have to do the math for yourself, sorry.

The project

Once you dive into Tasker, the specifics of your project, in order, will be to build a Task that collects the current time, compares it to a Variable containing a previously saved time, if the difference is too short, it throws up an Alert, and then it re-writes the placeholder time Variable for use the next time this Task runs. With the Task complete, you then build a Profile that runs every time the battery level changes. Nice and easy.

Time comparison Task

We start off by building our Task, which will be the major piece of this project. As always, this could be built out into a few different re-usable Tasks, but we’ll do it all at once for today.

Head to the Task section and hit the “+” button to begin a new Task. Name it appropriately, I’ll call mine “BatteryDrainWarning“.

Now, we must start at the end, with our Variable, to prevent errors when we start doing the heavy lifting.

Tap the “+” button to start the action.

Choose Variables.

Choose Variable Set.

Provide a name for your new variable. Remember that you need to start with the % symbol and we want this variable to go global, so use all capital letters. I’ll call mine “%BATTCHANGETIME“.

Now, in the To section, tap the little label icon to search the built-in variables, choose Uptime Seconds. Or, you can just type “%UPS” onto the To line.

Tap the system Back button to save and exit out of the action.

Now, this is important, you need to run this Task before we continue. Just tap that triangle play icon in the bottom left, watch for the green dot beside the Variable action to confirm completion.

Now we can proceed to the big actions. Tap that “+” button to start your next action.

Once again, select Variables and then Variable Set.

Name your next variable something like “%BATTDIFF“.

Then, in the To section, enter a mathematical equation to calculate the time in between battery changes, since we are using UpTime, we simply subtract our saved UpTime in the previous Variable from the current UpTime. Or, just enter the following:

%UPS – %BATTCHANGETIME

Now, turn on the check box beside Do Maths.

Hit that system Back button and let’s take some action.

Tap the “+” button to add your next action.

Choose Task.

Choose If.

In the Condition fields, first enter your battery difference variable, mine was “%BATTDIFF“.

Tap the “~” button to change the comparison to Maths: Less Than, which will enter the “<” symbol.

Then enter into the Value field your number of seconds you want your device to last between battery drain, if you recall from earlier, mine is 108.

Tap the system Back button to get back to the actions list.

With that IF in place, we are saying simply, if the difference in time between now and the last time our battery changed levels is less than 108 seconds, let’s do something. What shall we do? Let’s keep this simple, I’d like for now to just flash a message on the screen.

Tap the “+” button.

Choose Alert.

Choose Flash.

In the Text field, write yourself a message, remember to include the variables to add extra value. You might put something like:

“Battery discharged 1% in the last %BATTDIFF seconds. Now at %BATT% and dropping fast.” Or you might just put “Battery drain warning” if you don’t want to see the details on the screen.

Tap the system Back button to get back tot he actions list.

Now, as all good programmers will tell you, we must close the IF statement with an END IF.

Tap that “+” button.

Select Task.

Select End If. Nice and easy.

Now, before you do anything else, we have to clean up that first action we created, remember that it is supposed to be the last things we do here, not the first.

Long press on the right hand edge of the action, then drag to the bottom.

im

There we go, we now have a Task that looks at the time your battery last changed, figures out how long ago that was, then if, and only if, that amount of time is too short for our liking, we throw a warning message onto the screen. Then, at the end, we re-set the variable that remembers the last time the battery level changed, all ready to go for next time.

Remember to hit that system Back button to exit out of the Task creation. What we need now is to create the Profile that makes this all take action.

Profile to run the battery warning Task

Now that you have the Task filled out with calculations and actions all completed, let’s create the Profile that triggers it.

Head over to Profiles and hit that “+” button to get started. Provide a name, if asked, I called mine “BatteryDischarge“.

Choose Event.

Choose Power.

Choose Battery Changed.

Change priority if you so desire, otherwise just hit the system Back button to continue.

Now choose your “BatteryDrainWarning” Task.

One last thing before we call this complete, I am sure you do not want to see the warning pop up when you are charging the device. Right now it will, so let’s add a condition so that the Task only fires off when your device is not plugged in.

Long press on the words Battery Changed.

Choose Add.

Choose State.

Choose Power.

Choose Power. (Again.)

Leave it on Any and turn on the check mark beside Invert.

Hit that system Back button to see your new completed Profile.

Sit back and enjoy. Or, I suppose this is not something to enjoy, being that when you see this project in action, your battery is dying quickly. But hey, you know what I mean.

Remember that you can go back to that IF statement and change up your time to get different results. If you increase the number, you will see more warnings, if you decrease the number, you will see fewer warnings. If you just want to test to make sure this thing is working, temporarily change that 108 to like 10800, then you are sure to see the message every time the battery level drops.

What’s next

I found that my warning message was too long, most times I wasn’t able to read it all before it disappeared from the screen. That said, I didn’t want to remove any of the information, so I needed to do something, and making it appear on screen longer was not desirable. What do you know, we created a project just last week that takes information like this and writes it to a text file. Now I have a BatteryWarningsLog.txt file saved on my device that I can jump back to if I miss the actual warnings.

We worked off of a single battery life expectancy for the project today, but we all know that battery life is different when the display is turned on vs when it is off. No worries, you can handle this too. I’ll leave the work to you, but, basically, you can completely duplicate today’s project with the longer time value (screen-off should last you 24+ hours, right? Or more than 864 seconds.) When creating the profile, add an extra condition, Display->Display State Off and add the opposite Display State On for the first profile created today.

If flashing a message to the display is not appropriate or enough for you, as it wouldn’t be with the display turned off, consider using different notification tools. For example, I’ve gone ahead and used the Notify LED action. Just flash the red light a few times, then turn it off. No point having a lingering notification and flashing lights to kill the battery even faster.

But wait, there’s more. I just wanted to explain one last thing that I’ve done for my project, I wanted more info, so I created another variable that figures out how much longer my battery will last at its current level and rate of discharge. I simply added that into my on-screen popup message. Oh, and don’t forget that you can use tools like Pushbullet to receive these warnings remotely to your PC or other devices.

A couple things to be aware of: because we are utilizing the device up-time for our calculations, the very first battery change after a reboot may provide a false positive warning. You may also see hiccups when you first unplug from charging your device. You can overcome these by adding full Tasker projects to change that BATTCHANGETIME variable when the device is powered on or when removed from charger. I can live with these two minor and predictable false positives, myself.

Finally, all we have done today is identify when your battery is discharging quickly. If you need to figure out what is killing your battery, be sure to jump back to some of our previous posts on the subject.

Track battery killer apps
Use ADB to see what’s eating your battery

Next week

I hope this Android customization project was as much fun for you as it was for me. Perhaps it is a little frivolous to track real-time battery consumption, and maybe just a bit rough on the battery itself, but I certainly learned how to use old functions in new ways on this project. Next week will be more of this concept, we won’t be looking at your battery again, instead, we are planning to put together an automated time card, for you to track your time spent doing, well, whatever it is you do.

I have to admit that I only just thought up this project a week ago, do any of you have similar projects, or advice you’d care to share?

BBC adds HTML5 compatibility to its iPlayer for desktop and Android

The BBC on Tuesday announced that it would be adding a layer of HTML5 compatibility to the desktop version of its iPlayer. Users will be invited to install a cookie in their browser for access to the HTML5 iPlayer, and for those that opt out of the prompt, the Adobe Flash version will remain available.

Adobe’s Flash Player is slowly being used less and less. In fact, it’s almost surprising it hasn’t been killed off in favor of HTML5, but many corporations and avenues continue to use the service, even after seeing some serious security vulnerabilities.

The BBC in a Tuesday blog post said that it was “now confident [it could] achieve the playback quality you’d expect from the BBC without using a third-party plug-in,” such as Flash. Flash will remain an option in iPlayer, but that’s largely due to the HTML5 iPlayer only being beta. The BBC is testing the HTML5 iPlayer in the following websites:

• Firefox 41
• Opera 32
• Safari on iOS 5 and above
• BlackBerry OS 10.3.1 and above
• Internet Explorer 11 and Microsoft Edge on Windows 10
• Google Chrome on all platforms

BBC also said that it was offering the HTML5 iPlayer for Android, only the beta will be limited to 1,000 users, for the time being. Those interested can sign up here.

Hopefully it won’t be long before the BBC is able to move the iPlayer to HTML5 only, as it’s a fast moving technology that’s only getting better and better. Then again, it’s possible a new video format could take the crown in the future.

source: BBC

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Cricket Wireless expands its retail footprint to almost 1600 Target locations

AT&T’s subsidiary, Cricket Wireless, is expanding its retail presence by offering its smartphones in nearly 1600 Target locations across the United States. Starting October 25, Target customers will be able to get their hands on a Cricket Wireless-powered device in-store and online.

Those who are interested will see data plans starting at a meager $35/mo after a $5 AutoPay credit. You’ll also be able to take advantage of Cricket Wireless’ vast 4G LTE network, boasting more coverage than T-Mobile, Boost, Sprint, and even MetroPCS.

Here’s just a few things you can expect to see in making the jump to Cricket Wireless as your carrier:

• “Bring Your Own Device” Universal SIM Card Kit for compatible devices
• Unlimited texts and calls to and from the US, Mexico and Canada on a Smart or Pro plan
• Compelling selection of smartphones from HTC, LG, Samsung and ZTE ranging from $49.99 – $129.99

Do any of our readers use Cricket Wireless? How happy are you with their service? Be sure to let us know in the comments!

source: Cricket Wireless

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Android TV adds HBO NOW, Showtime, CBS All Access, and finds new hardware partners

This afternoon, Google announced the availability of new apps and services for users of its home entertainment platform. Television shows and movies are premiering left and right as of late, so Google wants to ensure that Android TV is the go-to for consuming video content.

Android TV now provides access to HBO NOW, Showtime, CBS All Access and Disney Movies Anywhere. This is in addition to the more than fifty apps that Google says the Play Store offers. To use many of the services with apps made for Android TV, you will either need a subscription or accepted television provider login. Some may even require one-time purchases.

Will you be watching anything from these services? Like the new season of Homeland on Showtime. Or how about NCIS on CBS? Alright, go ahead and get Frozen from Disney Movies Anywhere.

Google also named new hardware partners for Android TV. Hisense, TCL, and other unnamed companies will work to release televisions and gaming consoles while Pace, Sagemcom, and Technicolor will begin manufacturing set-top boxes with the Android TV pre-installed. When it comes to content, users in Korea and Italy can expect to see KDDI and Telecom Italia add their portfolio to the platform. Google is already seeing Android TV hardware arrive from Sony, Sharp, Razer, and NVIDIA.

Source: Google

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