Phone battery (power/energy usage) measurements (at least for Android)

[rugk]

Just for the record, because the community here may care about that: With the official Home Assistant companion app you can enable a battery power sensor (at least on Android), and thus you can also calculate the power and energy usage of your phone.

Some caveats/problems make it a little more complex though:

1. Usually, the sensor also shows the discharging. This needs to be filtered out, as we only care about the charging power.
2. As phones are likely to move around, you also need to filter out your phone when it is not charging at home.

I did describe my solution in the official Home Assistant forum in detail, but basically with some custom sensor templates and Riemanns sum/integral, this can be accomplished (without PowerCalc BTW).

[rugk]

Of course, possibly such a solution could also be integrated into PowerCalc, because well, there is still one obvious caveat: if the phone is powered off while charging, you get no measurements. 🤔

This would involve quite complex guessing of the energy usage (I guess?) based on the battery capacity of the phone (which in turns requires identifying the phone model – apps like AccuBattery can do that, BTW) and the last and new battery percentage, though? Or well… it could also be simple math, but quite complex for a "simple home assistant-only solution".

It would also make creating all these sensors more easy, I guess.

[bramstroker]

@rugk thanks for sharing this idea. Seems feasible to integrate this in Powercalc profiles.
Will also do some testing on my phone how the sensors behave and check for correctness with power meter.
When this is close to reality we could definitely provide a way to have powercalc profiles and discovery for phones exposing this sensor.

[Maxik933]

Just for the record, because the community here may care about that: With the official Home Assistant companion app you can enable a battery power sensor (at least on Android), and thus you can also calculate the power and energy usage of your phone.

Some caveats/problems make it a little more complex though:

1. Usually, the sensor also shows the discharging. This needs to be filtered out, as we only care about the charging power.
2. As phones are likely to move around, you also need to filter out your phone when it is not charging at home.

I did describe my solution in the official Home Assistant forum in detail, but basically with some custom sensor templates and Riemanns sum/integral, this can be accomplished (without PowerCalc BTW).

@rugk That is a nice idea in itself, but the implementation runs into two additional problems. First, the sensor measures the net current flow, which can result in negative values during concurrent use despite being plugged in. Second, dynamic charging curves are lost due to the rigid polling intervals of one to fifteen minutes, while the internal Android measurements only provide imprecise estimates anyway.

PS
thought was going crazy for wanting to integrate my electric Oral-B toothbrush via its battery sensor. Seems like I'm in good company here.

[rugk]

First, the sensor measures the net current flow, which can result in negative values during concurrent use despite being plugged in

See my forum post, I already accounted for that. It's easy to filter out negative values, after all.
Edit: Ahhh, now I understand, it's of course the net value aka the "current usage" may not be accounted for. Yeah, maybe better discuss that in the forum. I personally think that's fine though and is not sooo much value that is being missed there, but it's a fair point, of course. I don't know other sensors for that, though.

Second, dynamic charging curves are lost due to the rigid polling intervals of one to fifteen minutes,

Please see the HA docs, they allow you to enable a setting to update the sensors each minute when charging (IIRC the app also suggests this tip in the app near the battery sensors, which is very useful!):

You can change the frequency of sensor updates by navigating to Settings > Companion App > Sensor Update Frequency. [....] When set to Fast Always updates will come in every minute. When set to Fast While Charging updates will only come in every minute only while the device is charging, otherwise the default interval will be used.

https://companion.home-assistant.io/docs/core/sensors/#how-sensors-update

edit: or what do you want to imply? That 1 minute is not enough? If you can explain and argue for this (I cannot), then I guess you can surely open an issue for that in the HA companion app repo. They may adjust it, after all or make it more clever/less "rigit", whatever. It's surely possible. and "only" an implementation detail.

Just test it! It seems to work great for me! :)

[rugk]

Haha and the PS is funny, do you have a link for how to do that? 😅