How can I read the status of the battery on my MacBookPro from my own application?
Googling has so far only revealed APIs for device drivers to handle power events -
Look at the System Management Controller. I don't have my MBP handy, but I believe you need to look at smc.h
Maybe help extracted text into script app
pmset -g batt | head -n 1 | cut -c19- | rev | cut -c 2- | rev
output
Battery Power
AC Power
You'll want to use IOKit for this, specifically the IOPowerSources functions. You can use IOPSCopyPowerSourcesInfo()
to get a blob, and IOPSCopyPowerSourcesList()
to then extract a CFArray out of that, listing the power sources. Then use IOPSGetPowerSourceDescription()
to pull out a dictionary (see IOPSKeys.h for the contents of the dictionary).
If you're looking for a quick way to query it from the command line, you'll find the pmset command helpful. To query the battery status, specifically, use:
$ pmset -g batt