Power Management

[Aswathy]

Hi,

  Thanks for the suggestions........... The whole scenario goes like this:

 As part of our final year project, we have decided to do a power management
application for the OLPC.

 As per our ideas, we have decided to implement the features that normal
laptops have as a power management module in it. Currently in OLPC only the
battery status ie discharging/charging of the battery is shown also the
percentage. This is the only thing that is available or seen to the user. So
we thought of enhancing this by adding further more features like time
display along with the percentage level. Also a properties window that helps
the user to set-up the different modes of the system. Then to warn the user
when the battery level goes beyond a level probably the critical level. We
can warn the user with beep sounds as well as the pop-up windows showing the
messages to save all the running activities and shutdown the system or just
start the charging process.

 These are some of the ideas that we have thought. And we completed the time
display module. We tried it in our lab system in Fedora core7 platform & we
got the output here. For this we generated all the files in OLPC required
for the program in our system and tested it. But when tried it in OLPC, we
got the output as such but not with the close button on the top of the
window and also no toolbar was shown. As such no window appeared. Actually
we have compiled the program (with original files in OLPC) in our system and
got the executable file and took this in a usb and we tried to run the
executable file in the usb (the command we used : ./program_file_name). So
the output was displayed but as soon as it was run a whole screen came up
with these details. When we go to the home mode, then this appears like a
round icon in the ring. Similar to the mesh icon near the battery icon. When
we close the terminal this will also go.

  We have written this using gtk+ in C. Because we are familiar with C more
than Python. So we opted for C. Anyways only the executable file is needed
for the OLPC for the proper functioning of our application. So what ever be
the programming language we think that it doesn't matter. For the whole
application, we thought of developing the GUI by Glade and we will write the
callback functions in C (gtk+). This will help the user to set up their
choices for different modes activation. Also the time, battery status and
percentage level (we thought of starting it from scratch because the
existing code is in Python so we feel little difficulty in modifying that,
so we started off from the beginning) will be shown in this GUI. And the
warning levels are written in program that runs internally.

 Our idea was to create this as an application (activity) but not in the
concept of the general activity (sugar activity) in the OLPC. A icon similar
to the battery icon in the home mode will act as the icon for our
application. It will have a resume option only. On resuming, the user can
see the details & change the set-ups as per their choice. And they need to
click the OK button to activate that changes (as in the normal laptops
generally in Windows we have power options that have both Ok, Cancel buttons
to activate and deactivate the changes also a close button at the top of the
window). A similar kind of application is our dream. This program should run
from the starting up of the OS till the shutting down of the system. So we
need to include this as s running process in the background in the OS level.


 This is our whole idea. Do give suggestions on this. Also how we can make
this application compatible with the OLPC. Actually we were really new to
the OLPC. We just came to know about OLPC last year. We started thinking
about our project this January. So we have very limited knowledge about
OLPC. Please do give suggestions & your valuable recommendations on this.



aswathy
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