Convenient low-battery notification for your Apple Mac with Bluetooth devices.
Mac OS warns your Magic Mouse is running out of power at 2%. Not ideal given the charging port location. MagicPowerAlert lets you know at 35% by default, giving you lots of time to fit in a charging session at a time of your choosing.
Competency level: comfortable using Terminal, and cron.
$ mkdir MagicPower
$ cd MagicPower
$ curl -L0 -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/thisdougb/MagicPowerAlert/master/MagicPowerAlert.sh
$ ./MagicPowerAlert.sh status
Magic Keyboard with Numeric Keypad at 98%
Magic Mouse 2 at 47% (charging)
The default should be fine, it'll pick up either mouse or keyboard below 35% power. But you can change this is you like.
# Set to mute consecutive alerts for a period of minutes. Makes it practical to schedule
# MagicPowerAlert to run frequently, say every 30 minutes. Really, two alerts per day are
# probably enough of a reminder. So a good value is maybe 4 hours.
MUTE_CONSECUTIVE_ALERTS_HOURS=4
# Inactivity detection. If user is afk, don't continue and possibly spam the desktop with alerts.
# For example, no alerts during the night when running other automated tasks.
INACTIVITY_THRESHOLD_MINS=5
# You can change the message, if coffee is not your thing.
MESSAGE="Get a coffee and charge:"
Give it a quick test, set the alert THRESHOLD to 100 by supplying as an argument. A window prompt should pop-up, with your alert.
$ chmod +x MagicPowerAlert.sh
$ ./MagicPowerAlert.sh 100
Remember that running while muted will not pop-up an alert. So just remove this file if you want to re-test.
$ ls -l MagicPowerAlert.sh.mute
-rw-r--r-- 1 dougb staff 0 4 Apr 11:29 MagicPowerAlert.sh.mute
If you haven't used cron before, then the relevant info (from 'man 5 cron') is:
The time and date fields are:
field allowed values
----- --------------
minute 0-59
hour 0-23
day of month 1-31
month 1-12 (or names, see below)
day of week 0-7 (0 or 7 is Sun, or use names)
A field may be an asterisk (*), which always stands for first-last.
To specific a range use 9-12, which gives 9, 10, 11, 12.
To step through a range use */<step>, for example */5 will give 0, 5, 10, etc.
Add a cron entry with your file path and time preferences. To avoid waking up to a hundred pop-up alerts, ensure you configure muting and inactivity to suitable values.
For example, this runs every 30 minutes:
*/30 * * * * /Users/dougb/dev/MagicPowerAlert/MagicPowerAlert.sh
Of course you can delete the cron entry, or simply comment it out.
# switched off
#*/30 * * * * /Users/dougb/dev/MagicPowerAlert/MagicPowerAlert.sh