Monitor Android Battery Level with Pimatic

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I wanted a way to monitor my android’s battery and trigger actions in pimatic depending on battery state. I am no dev but I can use tasker for pretty much anything I have in mind and here is how I’ve done it.

I create a variable on pimatic called android-battery-level , then I create a simple profile in Tasker which POST %BATT to pimatic every 5 minutes.

curl -k -X PATCH --header "Content-Type:application/json" --data '{"type": "value", "valueOrExpression": %BATT}' --user "user:pass" https://pimatic:port/api/variables/android-battery-level

Then you can use $android-battery-level in your rules

IF 
$android-battery-level is decreasing and $android-battery-level < 20
THEN 
pushbullet title:"Battery Low" message:"Charge your phone"

Tasker in combination with pimatic is crazy. There are so many nice addons/scripts etc. Nice realy nice

@Icesory : there are a lot of posibilities to use tasker and pimatic together! For example I can controll all devices with my voice and something else.
@sebastienvg Sebastion thank you for these nice idea. But one question: Did you use in Tasker the function HTTP POST and if yes can you tell me where you fill in the function patch!

@fabikrauss I have curl installed on my droid I actually use the “Run Shell” action. I wish someone can help us use the POST feature instead. But maybe I went the wrong way I’ll try that instead in my config.json and I should be able to HTTP POST then

{
      "id": "droid-battery-level-device",
      "name": "Droid Battery Level",
      "class": "ShellSensor",
      "attributeName": "Level",
      "attributeType": "number",
      "command": ""
    },

I’ll let you know once I tested

nice Idea, I’m also a big fan of Tasker and realized alot of crazy stuff with it.

I’m using a slightly different approach to communicate with pimatic using tasker:
I got 1 Task called HttpPostPimatic (with action: “HTTP Post”) that accepts a parameter, and then I can just call that task from other tasks with a parameter like “set $android-battery to 20%” or “turn desklight on”, the api-path is api/execute-action and data-field is {“actionString”: %par1}, it’s really simple.

For example i’m using that for turning on my heating @ home automatically when leaving the Wifi @ work at evening, so that it’s already warm when I’m back home.

@Ralf-H are you able to share a capture of your Tasker task and maybe another one that uses it?

sure, here it is. The URL isn’t visible on this screenshot, it’s just user:password@host:port
content-type is application/json of course

@Ralf-H thanks for posting this but I must be missing something, when I run the Task that passes the actionString to HttpPostPimatic the logs in pimatic says:

14:13:58.595 [pimatic] error: expected param: actionString

I have tried to “set $android-battery to %BATT” as well as “turn X10-office-neon off” and same issue. Of course I have the $android-battery defined. Any idea?

That’s strange, because here it works. I’m sure you checked obvious things like double-quotes etc.
Try to change the data-field of HTTP Post directly to this

{"actionString": "set $android-battery to %BATT"} 

and see what happens.

@Ralf-H got it, you need to add application/json in the “Content-Type” field in the HttpPostPimatic task. Thanks a lot for the trick.

@sebastienvg

Nice to hear that it works for you now. I mentioned application/json 2 posts above.

@Ralf-H I missed it

By the way @Ralf-H did you take a look at @Oitzu pimatic-location plugin and Android app , it’s got Tasker integration as well. I use it to control the heat and deal with the garage door.

Are you intresset how you can GET values with tasker?
For example I use it in this way:
I say “Luftfeuchtigkeit"
Then tasker start a HTTP get and store it in a tasker variable.
Then I use a popup which shows the humidity and a voice say :” The humidity is 32%"
You can use it with out voice controll but if you intresset let me know.

@fabikrauss I used that to get $whoishome value

@sebastienvg

that sounds really nice, I’ll definitely try that. Normally I decline to use location service or gps on android because of battery drain, but with balanced power it could work. It would be cool because my smartphone almost always misses that my Wifi is in range when the display is off, normally it should turn the lights on when I’m in range & the sun has gone down. When the display is on it notices my wifi almost instantly and connects, could be some kind of deep-sleep mode, but I don’t have these problems with gcm-pushes. It’s strange.

@sebastienvg Ah okay I see
You can only use curl to run the shell on you android device with a root?

@fabikrauss http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=2362386 I don’t think so but I never tried because I can never keep a stock Android longer than the time it takes to download a ROM.

Futhermore I think it’s possible to trigger rules with a http post with the help of the ifttt plugin but I didn’t test it until now.

@sebastienvg said:

By the way @Ralf-H did you take a look at @Oitzu pimatic-location plugin and Android app , it’s got Tasker integration as well. I use it to control the heat and deal with the garage door.

Sadly the app is crashing on my Galaxy S4, right after I press “Test & Save”.