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Comment by LeoPanthera | Hacker News Reader

A huge advantage of AlDente over this is the "sailing" feature. I have mine configured to stop charging at 80%, but then only start charging again when it drops to 50%. It's ideal for preventing lots of very short charging sessions. (This is also an ideal pattern for charging EVs.)

It also has a "calibrate" feature which goes through a 100 -> 10 -> 100 cycle which teaches the battery firmware what the actual capacity is now. Useful to run every month or two.

My Air battery is three years old and has 99% health because of using these features.

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Dells have had this feature built into their BIOS for many years: https://forum.endeavouros.com/uploads/default/original/3X/4/...

That's right, in the BIOS - it's independent of the OS being run, or indeed if there is any OS at all (which is the case if the machine is turned off and charging.)

HP also have this in bios. If you download their "Biosconfigutility64.exe" and run it with argunents, you can switch the behaviour on the fly without requiring a visit to bios

https://developers.hp.com/hp-client-management/blog/improvin...

My son's Lenovo laptop, bought from Costco, also has this feature.

In the BIOS? From what I've read, Thinkpads at least need a driver and utility to set the discharge/charge thresholds.

Yes, I don't have it to hand, but I'm pretty sure the charge limit even works when the laptop is shut down.

It's not a ThinkPad, but an IdeaPad Slim 5i i7-1355U touchscreen.

There's more info on the feature here:

https://gist.github.com/linrunner/4a6876648765fac5e141f15d05...

The cli docs say this:

  battery calibrate
    calibrate the battery by discharging it to 15%, then recharging it to 100%, and keeping it there for 1 hour

Well that's good. AlDente can automatically schedule it, which is convenient.

I have a crontab that checks the battery status every 5 mins. If the battery level is lower than 60%, it turns charging on. If it's higher than 80%, it turns charging off.

Of course, this doesn't help if you happen to turn the laptop off before it reaches 80%. In that case, it will charge all the way to 100%.

"sailing" feature

Also known as a Schmitt Trigger

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schmitt_trigger

I use AlDente, but notice if i left my machine charge overnight, it still charges over my set limit(for example, i set at 80%, but in the morning i see my machine at 87%)

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