jandedobbeleer/battery

The battery project helps software developers read battery information, like charge level, voltage, and whether the battery is charging or full, in a consistent way regardless of what operating system their code runs on. Every operating system exposes battery data differently, so this library handles those differences behind the scenes and hands the application a clean, uniform set of values. At a high level, the library reads raw battery metrics from the operating system and normalizes them into standard units: milliwatts for power, milliwatt-hours for capacity, and volts for voltage. It works across a wide range of systems, including Linux, macOS, Windows XP and later, and several BSD variants plus Solaris. Developers can retrieve all batteries on a machine and then access properties like current capacity, design capacity, charge rate, and state without worrying about the underlying platform-specific plumbing. A developer building a system monitoring tool, a status bar widget, or a command-line utility that reports laptop battery health would find this useful. For instance, if you are writing a cross-platform desktop app and want to show how much battery life remains, this library lets you write that logic once and have it work on a Mac, a Windows laptop, or a Linux machine. The README also notes a small command-line tool that prints a quick battery summary, similar to what the acpi command shows on Linux. The project is written in Go, which is commonly used for tools that need to run across different operating systems with minimal changes. The key tradeoff it makes is breadth of platform support: by focusing on a normalized set of common metrics, it may not surface every obscure detail a specific operating system provides, but it gives developers a simple, typed interface that works predictably everywhere.