Coconut Battery

This is a really cool OS X app that not only shows how much of a charge is left on your iBook or PowerBook battery, but also how much of the battery’s original capacity is left. Over time all laptop batteries gradually lose capacity, but most of the time you can’t tell how much of that life is left.

Posted in Technology | Comments (5)

5 Responses to “Coconut Battery”

1. Ian says:

   7/27/2006 at 7:10 pm

   This is a cool app. But! When using it on my MacBook, I get kernal panic when I close the lid for a while at low battery with this app running. then i open it ot the worst error of all. Just so you know. this only happened once. My comp still works fine.
2. Dave says:

   11/28/2006 at 11:10 pm

   I just downloaded coconut battery for my ailing Powerbook battery. After installing, I received two “black screen of death”s indicating the sudden need to reboot. This was the first time I had seen that on this computer, but I didn’t connect the install with the crash. Later, I installed this software on an iBook, which crashed immediately after running the app, and upon rebooting gave a fatal error message which will require a reinstall of the OS.
3. Rick says:

   1/3/2007 at 8:53 pm

   I’ve been running Coconut Battery on my PowerBook G4 and iBook G3 for several months and have had absolutely no problems. I’ve got the widget active as well.

   Great application!
4. Marty says:

   11/6/2007 at 9:16 pm

   This is an truly nifty application that opens some interesting questions.

   The author (Christoph Sinai) indicates that this tool uses CoreData to show a set of stats about the battery. I’ve been using this on a Clamshell iBook SE running Tiger (yup) in order to assess the viability of a batch of old Clam batteries. Sometimes the data is incomplete, like zero battery loadcycles for a 1999 Apple battery. Some 2007 NuPower batteries show everything properly, and some unidentifiable third-party batteries are in between. The battery management technology has clearly been in the Clam all along, just hidden, mostly, aside from the (minimal) menu-bar battery info.

   All this implies to me that there’s a wee little processor on the battery pack itself, to count the load cycles and keep track of current battery capacity. I wonder (out loud) if there is any way to reach in and give that little counter chip a whack upside the head, so that it rethinks the current battery capacity. (I’ve got a battery here with original battery capacity of -1 mAh and zero loadcycles. We know that ain’t right!)

   Lastly, I think the “black screen of death” is triggered by a sudden loss of serial communication to that battery charge controller chip. I’ve had it pop a couple of times when I’ve removed the battery while the system is in Sleep and the AC adapter is plugged in. (Just my guess.)

   So, can anybody shine some light on my speculations?
5. geile huisvrouwen says:

   3/15/2008 at 8:02 pm

   gratis huisvrouwen…

   Geile huisvrouwen…