Name: Battery Up Down
Rating: 4.3 (27 reviews)
Author: CloggyAbroad

Please Note: Due to time constraints and other priorities I no longer provide updates for my datafields. All my datafields were developed because I had a personal need for them at the time and I decided to make them available to everyone, but I currently do not have the time to keep up with the pace of new devices being added to Garmin's lineup.


NEW: Now writes battery information to the FIT file for later analysis in Garmin Connect

To buy me a beer click here: paypal.me/CloggyAbroad

If like me you suffer from severe battery anxiety then Battery Up Down is the Data Field for you*. As this is a single data field it needs to be selected on one of the data screens of an existing activity profile

Battery Up Down is my take on a combined battery monitor and battery life estimator. It will initially display battery percentage but after a short period (up to a few minutes depending on model and discharge rate) this changes to battery time remaining. For those devices capable of being charged during an activity it will also display the time required until the device is fully charged.

Whenever a change of direction (charge to discharge, discharge to charge) is detected Battery Up Down will revert back to showing battery percentage until sufficient data is collected to calculate the remaining time. During charging the display will flash to distinguish between discharging and charging**.

Because the reported battery percentage doesn't appear all that accurate at the extremes of the range (nearly empty or nearly full) Battery Up Down will change to displaying a percentage any time the battery level is below 10%** or above 98%**. As a further precaution against inadvertently running out of battery the discharge time is calculated down to 3%** rather than 0% so will always be slightly pessimistic.

A note to Edge users: this datafield is intended to monitor battery use during a single long activity. If you stop an activity and use the 'resume later' function to combine multiple rides in a single activity this is likely to cause strange results. This is not because this datafield isn't working as it should, but because what you are trying to do is outside the scope of this datafield. Please keep this in mind before posting feedback. Thank you

* I don't really but it makes a good opening line.
** User configurable