Hi all,
This is my first post here so I hope I have it in the right location. I was hoping someone has done this or can point me in the right direction. I have a a new setup using SmartThings and SmartTiles. I am using a 5th generation Fire table as my control panel and I’d like to have a tile that shows the battery life remaining on my Fire Tablet. The tablet is setup as a Thing now for presence and I thought it would show battery too, but can’t find it. Can you help?
Thanks!
Jamie
Hi Jamie,
The Fire Tablet is a popular device for SmartTiles (soon to be re-released next generation as ActionTiles), so we do put some focus on compatibility.
There are folks here with more experience than myself on various Android Apps that might best calculate Battery Life. Now … converting it into a Tile is not something we can do natively at this time. ActionTiles is focused on handling “SmartThings Things” only (with a few exceptions like Video streams).
Some really good (but more complex…) solutions might require rooting the Fire (or even a custom ROM), and could possibly be combined with background code that writes a Battery value to a SmartThings Virtual Device, … etc. Adding on @joshua_lyon’s “Sharp Tools” could play a part in the ultimate solution. I have not yet tested Sharp Tools on Fire Tablet, but Josh can verify and chime in with ideas.
Still… The best bet in the meantime is to search the Amazon App store for various Battery Apps and find one that will pop-up an alert at certain pre-determined low battery levels, perhaps?
Unfortunately, Tasker isn’t officially supported on Fire OS (only via Google Play), but I have seen people sideload it.
Terry is right on that with normal Android devices, you could grab your battery value with Tasker and post it to a custom SmartThings device with SharpTools!
I am looking for similar information, more than display the batery information on the tiles I was thinking to use this information as a device and be able to turn the smart outlet on or off where I have connected the tablet to charge it only when is needed, like turn the outlet on when batery life is on 10% and turn it off when is 100%.
Has somebody has been able to do that?
You could try using IFTTT Android Battery below 15% then trigger the plug to turn on. Been thinking about doing this for my tablet but considering that if the battery goes to waste from charging all the time, it’d still be cheaper to replace than buying a plug. =) I also have a few mechanical switches around that I might just have it charge 5 hrs a day or something instead of using a ST controlled plug.
I know it’s been a while, but just in case you’re still wondering…
Yes. I have made some marginally complex rules (Pistons) in CoRE using a similar setup.
I have an Aeon Labs DSC06106-ZWUS - Z-Wave Smart Energy Switch providing power to one of my wall-mounted SmartTiles Android tablets.
I have it there for something else, but as soon as I read the words you just typed, I decided that would be my next CoRE rule-making project.
Thanks for the great idea!
Ya, either way could work, depending on your use case, budget, etc.
For simplicity and the opportunity of it, I’m going with the smart switch for this one. After that, if I want to reproduce the energy saving effect, I will likely just get the timers as you suggested at least for the short-term.
Thanks for that further insight on this great idea!
So cool, guys 
Let us know your progress!
I will start to play a little bit with CoRE, I will see what can be accomplished,
Hi, I was just wondering if you might be able to point me in the right direction with this solution. I am unsure of what device handler i would require for this to be accomplished and also how would sharptools be able to post the value to this device ?
Thankyou
On the device type side of things, it would just be a simple DTH which include the battery capability and another capability which SharpTools has access to like Motion Sensor (or Switch, etc) and you would create a method to manually set the battery level:
Then SharpTools acts as the interface between Tasker and and SmartThings by calling the setBatteryLevel method you created with the appropriate value:
Specifically, if you want to take the battery value from Tasker, you would tap the tag icon in the action bar of the “A Thing” configuration for the SharpTools plugin in Tasker and enter the following:
Thing: {yourThingName}
Command: setBatteryLevel
Parameter1: %BATT
All of this depends on having Tasker on the device in the first place.
I have tasker and sharptools etc set up just wasn’t entirely sure on how to get this working. Thanks this is awesome
