[gpm] Storing energy data in a database for future polling , to find cumulative energy cost of a computing session

[Chris Adams <chris stemcel co uk>]

Hi there,

First post to the list, and if this qn has been asked already,and I missed when I first skimmed the docs please forgive me. 

I'm trying to work out if there's a way to easily store energy consumption data of a computer, so I can add these readings up over a set period to work out how much energy in watts has been used for a particular computing session.

However Gnome power manager already offers some graphing of power usage when turned on - so before reinventing the wheel, and creating an sqllite database to store data that's already being stored, I wanted to check - is this already being done internally somewhere?

If so, how can I poll it?

My current approach was going to be as follows: 

1) setting up a daemon to grep the output of  the `/usr/share/gnome-power-manager/gnome-power-bugreport` command, every n seconds.

2) store current charge in a database

3) at the end of a computing session (say, on sleep, or log off, or shutdown) measure the difference in charge inside the battery (taking into account whether it's plugged in or not to external power etc).

To give some context, I'm hoping to do this so I can eventually take this figure and pipe it through the AMEE carbon calculator, to work out the carbon footprint of using a machine for a set period. I then want to pipe THAT through http://carbon.to, to see what else could have been done with the energy I just spent using my computer...

Thanks,

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Chris Adams
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