explaingit

azcomp2000/battery-sentinel

★ 0KotlinAudience · developerComplexity · 2/5ActiveLicenseSetup · moderate

TLDR

An Android app written in Kotlin that monitors phone battery capacity and per-app drain without root, using a retro CRT terminal interface.

Mindmap

mindmap
  root((Battery-Sentinel))
    Inputs
      Android battery counters
      Per app usage stats
    Outputs
      Capacity in mAh
      Power draw stats
      CRT styled charts
    Use Cases
      Track battery health
      Spot draining apps
      No root monitoring
    Tech Stack
      Kotlin
      Jetpack Compose
      Room
      Coroutines
      MVVM

Things people build with this

USE CASE 1

Monitor a phone battery in milliampere-hours without rooting the device

USE CASE 2

Identify which installed apps are draining the most power

USE CASE 3

Study a Jetpack Compose plus Room MVVM Android codebase

USE CASE 4

Reuse the CRT scanline UI styling in another Compose app

Tech stack

KotlinJetpackComposeRoomCoroutinesAndroid

Getting it running

Difficulty · moderate Time to first run · 30min

No prebuilt APK is provided, so you need Android Studio Ladybug or newer and a Gradle sync before you can build and install.

MIT license, so you can use, modify, and redistribute the code freely as long as you keep the copyright notice.

In plain English

Battery Sentinel is an Android app that monitors a phone's battery in detail without needing root access. The README is presented in both English and Russian and is short, focused on what the app does rather than on installation or usage walkthroughs. The app tracks current battery capacity and power consumption in milliampere-hours by reading the system counters that Android exposes. It also collects per-app usage and drain statistics, again without requiring any system modification. The author describes this as the main selling point: most deep battery tools need root, and this one does not. The user interface is built in a retro terminal style. The README calls it a CRT aesthetic, with scanline effects and a beveled look. Data refreshes automatically every 30 seconds, and the refresh pauses on its own when the screen is off so the app does not waste power monitoring power. On the technical side, the app is written in Kotlin. The user interface uses Jetpack Compose, the local database is Room (a wrapper over SQLite), background work runs on Kotlin Coroutines and Flow, and the code follows an MVVM (Model-View-ViewModel) structure. There are three screenshots embedded in the README, though no live demo video. There is no prebuilt APK linked. Anyone wanting to try the app needs to open the project in Android Studio Ladybug or newer, wait for Gradle to sync, and build the APK from the Build menu. A credit line at the end attributes the app to DarkMByte as part of the Sovereign Engineering Initiative. The repository is MIT-licensed and tagged as a personal project rather than a polished consumer release.

Copy-paste prompts

Prompt 1
Open Battery-Sentinel in Android Studio Ladybug and produce a release APK I can install on my phone
Prompt 2
Explain how the app reads battery capacity counters on Android without needing root
Prompt 3
Walk me through the Room schema and how Coroutines and Flow drive the 30 second refresh
Prompt 4
Adapt the CRT scanline Compose styling into a separate reusable theme module
Prompt 5
Add an export feature that writes per-app drain history to CSV for offline analysis
Open on GitHub → Explain another repo

Generated 2026-05-22 · Model: sonnet-4-6 · Verify against the repo before relying on details.