Limit Battery Charging

eng3

I am using a Lenovo T420. It is typically best for battery life not to keep it at 100% all the time. Is there a way to configure in pfsense to have it stop charging at a certain percentage?

stephenw10

Set it in the BIOS?

There is nothing in pfSense to set that. If you're lucky someone might have written some custom code in FreeBSD to do it. I'm not aware of anything though.

Steve

eng3

@stephenw10 I know there is a windows tool from lenovo that can do it. otherwise, I there is no bios setting

stephenw10

Well it must set something in nvram since it's a microcontroller running that not anything in Windows. There a good change it will just stay at that if you reboot into pfSense.

eng3

I'll give it a try.

I also found this thread

https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/how-to-set-battery-charging-thresholds-on-laptop.79807

though I can't find the setting they refer to.

stephenw10

@eng3 said in Limit Battery Charging:

https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/how-to-set-battery-charging-thresholds-on-laptop.79807

Looks like fun!
Which part? Do you see any battery output? Derails from acpi etc?

Steve

johnpoz

@eng3 is there a way to have something else also on the ups, and have it control the charging of it.. Where then it sends shutdown to pfsense if no power and ups battery running low.

Pretty sure the nuts package allows for this.. The guy to ask is prob @dennypage

stephenw10

This is a laptop battery though. I don't think I've see a nut driver for that. Though that would be quite cool!

provels

24-hour lamp timer in UPS outlet, laptop power cord into timer. 2 hours on/2 hours off. Cake!

eng3

@provels charge and discharge rate is not equal. This also would put unnecessary cylces on the battery which would defeat the purpose of trying to limit the charge threshold.

johnpoz

@stephenw10 Oh I was thinking external UPS... well yeah that would be quite slick ;) but yeah don't think that possible..

provels

@eng3
Why the timers are adjustable in 1 hour increments.
Like discharge 3, charge 1 maybe? Do I have to think of everything?

eng3

@stephenw10 I tried but I get "acpi_call: not found". Also, not really too sure how to view battery level in pfsense

stephenw10

What exactly did you try? There are a number of things referenced here.

eng3

@stephenw10 I tried to execute "acpi_call"

stephenw10

Ah, OK. acpi_call is not included in pfSense or the default repo.
You can try adding it directly from FreeBSD like:

[22.01-RELEASE][admin@5100.stevew.lan]/root: pkg add https://pkg.freebsd.org/FreeBSD:12:amd64/latest/All/acpi_call-1.0.1_1.txz
Fetching acpi_call-1.0.1_1.txz: 100%    6 KiB   6.3kB/s    00:01    
Installing acpi_call-1.0.1_1...
Extracting acpi_call-1.0.1_1: 100%
[22.01-RELEASE][admin@5100.stevew.lan]/root: rehash
[22.01-RELEASE][admin@5100.stevew.lan]/root: acpi_call
Please specify path to method with -p flag

But you need to understand the possible consequences of doing that:
https://docs.netgate.com/pfsense/en/latest/recipes/freebsd-pkg-repo.html#concerns-warnings

Steve