Dynamic Battery Icon for LowBattery in sitemap

Tutorials & Examples Solutions
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I wanted to create a sitemap to show the battery status of all my battery powered things. Some have a battery percentage where it was easy to find an example sitemap, but for devices that only report lowbattery through a channel it was not so easy to find a nicely formatted example.

Here is a workable solution - not perfect as each item has to be added twice, but the results are pleasing.

First of all a battery percentage is trivial, showing dynamic icons and the actual percentage on the right.

Frame label="Trådfri Controllers Battery Level"
{
    Default label="TRADFRIRemoteControl_BatteryLevel"
    item=TRADFRIRemoteControl_BatteryLevel
}

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But the low battery item default, although simple to define, the results are not so great.

    Default label="TRADFRIRemoteControl_LowBattery"
        item=TRADFRIRemoteControl_LowBattery

This results in a moveable switch and the battery icon does not vary to show low battery warning

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After scanning the OH docs and community, I came up with this:

Frame label="Nest Protects Low Battery"
{

    Text item=KitchenNestProtect_LowBattery 
        label="Kitchen Nest Protect Battery" icon="battery" visibility=[ KitchenNestProtect_LowBattery==OFF]
    Text item=KitchenNestProtect_LowBattery 
        label="Kitchen Nest Protect Battery Low" icon="lowbattery" visibility=[ KitchenNestProtect_LowBattery==ON]
}

When battery is OK it shows as a green icon

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When battery is reporting low, then it displays a red icon - obviously a real example where a different device is currently reporting low battery.

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In the sitemap snippet, there are two entries for each device which are alternately displayed (visibility) based on the low battery status. The standard icons - battery and lowbattery are used. The label adds the word low and the switch icon is suppressed by changing the item type to text.

h.t.h.

1 Like
2

Nice approach. You could think about another approach using th dynamic icon feature, a proxy item and some rules.

1.) Create some icons representing the battery states 10% 20% … 90%
2.) Create a proxy item that is displayed in the sitemap with the icons just created
3.) Create a rule that sets the proxy item on every change or update to a rounded value of the real battery state e.g. 10%, 20%, …

So you should be able to use 10 or more different icons to display the battery state

3

If I recall correctly, the dynamic icon picker automagically rounds a Number Item down to the next available icon
e.g. if you have batt-20.svg , batt-50.svg etc
a value of 47 will show batt-20

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4

But LOW_BATTERY is either ON or OFF :pensive:

5

If it is only a ON/OFF low battery warning, I would personally just go with:

Text item=KitchenNestProtect_LowBattery 
        label="Kitchen Nest Protect Battery Low" icon="lowbattery" visibility=[ KitchenNestProtect_LowBattery==ON]

to only show a as warning if there is something to be alarmed about. In all other cases, the text and icon have very limited value to show.
But that is probably mostly a personal preference.

6

An alternative solution would be to make copies of the battery icons you want to use for ON/OFF and NULL then make copies of them into the icons/classic folder using https://www.openhab.org/docs/configuration/items.html#dynamic-icons.

That way you don’t need to use the visibility flag to achieve this behavior.

1 Like