Monitoring battery or power supply of laptop from java

Question

I am developing an application which monitors the presence of the power supply of the laptop. If there is a power cut or restoration it will intimate me over email. It will also application monitoring and controlling over email (Basically to control my laptop from my office over email). I am done with email interfacing but I have no idea on how to monitor the power supply / battery supply from java.

If any can give some pointer on this it will be of great help.

Thanks in advance ....

Answer 1

You have probably already solved this problem but for the others - you can do it the way Adam Crume suggests, using an already written script battstat.bat for Windows XP and higher. Here is an example of the resulting function:

private Boolean runsOnBattery() {
    try {
        Process proc = Runtime.getRuntime().exec("cmd.exe /c battstat.bat");

        BufferedReader stdInput = new BufferedReader(
            new InputStreamReader(proc.getInputStream()));

        String s;
        while ((s = stdInput.readLine()) != null) {
            if (s.contains("mains power")) {
                return false;
            } else if (s.contains("Discharging")) {
                return true;
            }
        }
    } catch (IOException ex) {
        Logger.getLogger(Main.class.getName()).log(Level.SEVERE, null, ex);
    }

    return false;
}

Or you can simplify the script to return directly True/False or whatever fits.

Answer 2

On linux, you can use /proc/acpi/battery/