Limit Battery Charging

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