Notification of low battery on a device

This issue has come out of a conversation we’ve had these days. in the Compatible Domotics Telegram group. If you are users of the Home App and have battery devices, you will have seen that the Home app only notifies us of Low Battery when the device has just over 5 minutes of battery left. Devices using a rechargeable battery work something better, but we can’t see the battery level either. Let’s see why this happens and what solutions we have in both HomeKit and Home Assistant. I am Carlos Sahuquillo and we start!

The problem: It is not easy to measure the load of a pile

The Home app cannot put the tongue on the poles of a pile to see if it has load As we did earlier (by the way, the World Health Organization already said that this method is unhealthy for a lot of reasons and that it can be dangerous if the stack has been removed because it can contain heavy metals such as mercury, niquel, cadmium or lithium, so you better not do it anymore). For a few years There were batteries of the Duracell brand that had a little bar that told you the load if you took the stack by touching the two poles.… but he didn’t go too far.

Also There’s a little trick that is to put the pile up, lift it up a little bit and let it fall… it’s supposed to be if it’s standing and it’s holding, it’s that it’s got liquid inside it and it’s still in it, but if it’s falling aside or it’s staggering it’s empty.. This has not worked for me in life, but good.

Then there are the smart people who say: ‘best to use a multimeter to measure the load ‘. I’ve had a multimeter in my life., and look what I’ve done with cables, Shellys and switches. Maybe I would have saved myself some spark or some Shelly blissful for playing where I shouldn’t, I don’t say no, but it’s not something I have at home everyone.

The thing is, when I was a kid, I knew the batteries were spent because my radio-control car that I used all day for a few hundred hours (I think that car went from 100,000 miles), went slow. However, when you put on new batteries, I was going like a shot and I was turning and I was fading beautifully.

Well, the House app does something like that. How There’s no real way to know how much percent of load left in a conventional pile, it tells you that the stack is near to being exhausted when it does not deliver all the voltage it should… which has a couple of problems: first, when a stack is not of a good brand (the typical Chinese batteries that we buy in bulk and that you get 400 batteries for 2 euros), you may not meet the quality standards of the most recognized brands and do not give the right voltage. This happens to me with a stack I currently have on a smart button, it’s a button I have in my older son’s room because where he has the

bed there’s no plug for the lamp, so you have a smart button that lights the lamp on top of the desk. The thing is, since I put that new pile on, it always indicates that it has a 0.5% load left. It works perfectly and the button led is turned on in green, if it really had low battery it would turn on in red… so I haven’t changed it at the moment.

However, When the battery delivers the correct voltage, then it marks that it is 100%… it is or is not just changed., so we may see that it is indicated that the device has the battery at 100% one day and the next day it is complaining of low battery at 10%, this has happened to me several times.

And, What’s the real problem? Well, at some point the stack is really over and the device is out of connection without you knowing., so sometimes you go crazy looking for why the noses have disconnected when it’s actually that they don’t have batteries left.

Solution: Low battery notification

I have a friend who changes the batteries every time in a systematic way. I do the same with the heads of the electric toothbrushes at home, I have an automatic purchase of those from Amazon and every 3 months he sends me the heads of Oral-B, so when the changes come all. One pasture actually, but I don’t expect to see if one head is more worn than another because that son has washed his teeth more and another has unnoticed. By the way, this type of time-based notifications can also be made from Controller for HomeKit from Advanced Notifications or with a shortcut, but in my case I use the Record app

iPhone files. The point is that my friend Luis changes the batteries every time of all the critical sensors of door opening, smoke, etc. They need it or not. Any environmentalist would be against this for the amount of charged batteries this guy throws away, but good.

In my case What I’ve done is to create a low battery notification that tells us when the battery does not deliver the correct voltage.. This can be done in HomeKit and Home Assistant, what happens is that to do it in HomeKit you can’t do it from the Home app… but we can do it very easily with the Driver for HomeKit app from the Maintenance Menu in the app.

Needless to say, this can also be sent to our mobile in real time as an Advanced Controller Notification. Yeah, I know the Advanced Notifications are only available in Controller if you pay for the subscription, what’s going to be done.

Besides, Controller has an interesting nonsense and it’s that You can associate the battery model that has that device.. I don’t know if you listen to Christian Garcia. @ patullinx, of podcast AppsMac in 8 minutes But the guy has a Notion database for everything. You can’t imagine the things he keeps on the daily Notion roll. But the thing is, he’s ever told that he’s got the cell database and home bulbs there so if he spends a stack, he goes to Notion and has the cell model that he uses that.

device. The same for light bulbs, if you melt a light bulb in your house because it goes directly to Notion which is where you have the bulb model, light temperature, fine thread or fat thread, etc., to be able to buy it exactly the same as the one that has fused without the need to dismount it. I haven’t had a light bulb in a thousand years, actually, but well, it can be interesting.

However, In Controller you can put what type of battery or battery each carries the devices and even allows you to buy them from here! And send you to Amazon! It is true that you put in the reference link of Controller, which takes a small commission of each of the sales… which I don’t think is bad at all, it can be a small extra for the development team of Controller if people buy the batteries from here, but I think they should let you know in case you disagree and more considering what it costs the Controller license today, which is of all but cheap (still, I tell you again that it’s worth it).

At Home Assistant I have it as a scheduled notification, every morning at 11: 00 he does a review of the state of the batteries and sends me a notification of the devices that have low battery. The good thing about Home Assistant is that, as you can integrate any device, not only the domotic devices but also the mobile, tablet, computer etc., as long as you install the Home Assistant desktop application, as you can include in this notification those devices to let you know at 11 in the morning if you have not put your computer to load or if your mobile phone is complaining of low battery.

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