Check battery level of connected bluetooth device on linux

linux bluetooth bluez
Ricardo picture Ricardo · Mar 2, 2018 · Viewed 36.8k times · Source

How can I check the battery level of a connected bluetooth device? The device shows the battery level on Android so I'm assuming the device supports the GATT-based Battery Service. However, by entering "menu gatt" in bluetoothctl and then listing the GATT attributes of the device with "list-attributes [dev]", nothing shows up.

A similar question was posted to SO but the OP seems to have found a solution that doesn't work for me. When I run "info [dev]" in bluetoothctl I don't see the UUID for Battery Service.

I would prefer a solution that runs on the command line and is distro-agnostic.

Please let me know if this question should be posted on SuperUser instead.

Answer

VeRo picture VeRo · Oct 19, 2018

This is such a great question, ahead of development and tools that are available at the moment.

The short answer (in October 2018)

you have to write it yourself! It won't be a one liner in the terminal. I am going to write this for myself in Python, but C has a little more documentation, so if you are skilled with C go for it.

The long answer, but it's more a recommended starting point:

  1. Tony D: https://youtu.be/5fQR2PHMDWE?t=4644 managed to use bluetoothctl to read attributes and send data to a bluetooth device. Definitely check the video information, you will find great links and references: https://learn.adafruit.com/introduction-to-bluetooth-low-energy/gatt
  2. Szymon Janc: https://youtu.be/VMDyebKT5c4 developer and contributer to the LINUX Bluetooth Stack

  3. Definitely check out how this question is answered on Mobile devices. For Android it's the BAS (Battery Service): https://android.stackexchange.com/questions/106073/displaying-bluetooth-gadgets-battery-status-on-the-phone

    On Android 8.0.1

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