On Thu, Oct 7, 2010 at 11:45 PM, Alex Gonzalez langabe@gmail.com wrote:

Hi, I haven't found any list for generic embedded linux questions so please redirect me if you know one. I am working on a Freescale MX51 board with a MC13892 PMIC which has a battery driver to monitor and control the battery. If I were to develop a battery powered device based on it, I would need a way to monitor the charge, turn on/off the charger if needed depending on battery level and suspend the system if the battery level drops. Some battery packs come with external chips that provide this functionality, but these battery packs are not available if you are not bulk purchasing. If I were to use the battery measurements provided by the PMIC to control the battery charge I would need to model the specific battery I am goint to use in terms of voltage/current graphs. Any known Linux effort towards this? Also, could the typical laptop user space applications (gnome panel applet et al) that typically use ACPI be used on an embedded system? Are there any other applications specifically targetted to the embedded market?

No ACPI on ARM yet. But you can take a look into drivers/power/ and the power_supply framework. Basically you need to provide those nodes as in your /sys/class/battery/BAT0/.

Software controlled charging would be rather tricky to implement, if it's using an external PMIC for the charging management, and possibly with a good gauge, things would be much easier.

As you may guess it's the first time I work on a battery powered embedded device. Thanks for your help, Alex _______________________________________________ linaro-dev mailing list linaro-dev@lists.linaro.org http://lists.linaro.org/mailman/listinfo/linaro-dev