Dell Command | PowerShell Provider 1.0 Advanced Battery Charge feature

Advanced Battery charge maximizes battery health while still supporting heavy use during the work day. Essentially what advanced battery charge feature does is that from “Beginning of Day” and lasting for “Work Period”, ExpressCharge™ is used for accelerated battery charging. At all other times Standard Charge is used for maximum battery health. BIOS F2 presents this feature as depicted in the screen shot below:

From the above screen shot, it is clear that the user is provided fields “Beginning Of Day” and “Work Period” for each day of the week and there is a check box for Enabling/Disabling this feature for all the days of week. The user can set the time and set a work duration during which ExpressCharge™ would be used.

Dell Command PowerShell Provider(DCPP) has strived hard to adhere to provide this feature as close to F2 screen as possible. DCPP provides 2 atttributes through which the user can  get and set advanced battery charge viz AdvancedBatteryChargingMode and AdvancedBatteryChargeConfiguration. This is as shown in the screen shot below:

AdvancedBatteryChargingMode is a simple enumerated attribute which takes only values ‘Enabled’ and ‘Disabled’ to respectively enable or disable the advanced battery charging feature. An example to set this attribute is shown below:

AdvancedBatteryChargeConfiguration is a more complex attribute which provides an interface to the user similar to BIOS F2 through which user can get and set advanced battery charge data. An example and command to view current data is as shown below:

Dir AdvancedBatteryChargeConfiguration|select –ExpandProperty CurrentValue

To set data for a specified day of the week , the below format of the command can be used provided along with a screen shot:

Set-item AdvancedBatteryChargeConfiguration Sunday –BeginningOfDay “13:45” –WorkPeriod “1:30”

As seen in the screen shot above, the user has set advanced battery charge data for Sunday with beginning of day as “13:45” and work duration as “1:30”. Please note the validation that minutes have to be in multiples of 15 i.e 0,15,30 and 45.

NOTE: If either system or admin password is set then it has to be provided with a –Password switch. An example is:

Set-item AdvancedBatteryChargeConfiguration Sunday –BeginningOfDay “13:45” –WorkPeriod “1:30” –Password mySysPassword