Check Battery and Network

mcdbus includes two read-only shortcut tools for checking hardware status: battery_status reads from UPower on the system bus, and network_status reads from NetworkManager on the system bus. Both tools only read properties — they do not change any state and require no confirmation prompt.

Battery status

“What’s my battery level?”

battery_status()

The tool enumerates all power devices through UPower, filters for battery-type devices (type 2 in the UPower spec), and returns a summary for each battery found:

## Battery Status

### DELL XXXX
- **Charge:** 73%
- **State:** Discharging
- **Time:** 2h 14m remaining
- **Power draw:** 12.3 W

What it reads

The tool calls org.freedesktop.UPower.EnumerateDevices to find all power devices, then reads org.freedesktop.UPower.Device properties on each one. The fields reported are:

Field	Source property	Notes
Charge	`Percentage`	0-100 float
State	`State`	Mapped from integer: 1=Charging, 2=Discharging, 3=Empty, 4=Fully charged, 5=Pending charge, 6=Pending discharge
Time remaining	`TimeToEmpty`	Seconds, shown as hours and minutes when discharging
Time to full	`TimeToFull`	Seconds, shown when charging
Power draw	`EnergyRate`	Watts
Model	`Model`	Battery model string from the hardware

Reading additional battery properties

The shortcut tool shows the most useful fields. For deeper information (voltage, energy capacity, charge cycles, technology), use get_all_properties on the battery device path:

get_all_properties(
    bus="system",
    service="org.freedesktop.UPower",
    object_path="/org/freedesktop/UPower/devices/battery_BAT0",
    interface="org.freedesktop.UPower.Device"
)

No battery found

On desktop machines without a battery, battery_status returns “No batteries found.” This is normal — UPower may still report other device types like line power or UPS units, but the tool filters for batteries specifically.

Network status

“Am I connected to the internet?”

network_status()

The tool reads properties from org.freedesktop.NetworkManager on the system bus and returns overall connectivity state, wireless status, and a table of active connections:

## Network Status

- **State:** Connected (global)
- **Wireless:** enabled

| Connection | Type | State |
|------------|------|-------|
| Ethernet 1 | 802-3-ethernet | Activated |
| MyWiFi | 802-11-wireless | Activated |

What it reads

The tool calls Properties.GetAll on the org.freedesktop.NetworkManager interface to get the top-level state, then iterates over ActiveConnections to read each connection’s properties.

Top-level properties:

Field	Source property	Notes
State	`State`	Integer mapped to: 0=Unknown, 10=Asleep, 20=Disconnected, 30=Disconnecting, 40=Connecting, 50=Connected (local), 60=Connected (site), 70=Connected (global)
Wireless	`WirelessEnabled`	Boolean

Per-connection properties (read from org.freedesktop.NetworkManager.Connection.Active on each active connection object path):

Field	Source property
Connection	`Id`
Type	`Type`
State	`State` (mapped: 1=Activating, 2=Activated, 3=Deactivating, 4=Deactivated)

Reading more network details

For detailed information about a specific network device (IP addresses, DNS servers, signal strength for wireless), use get_all_properties on the device’s object path. Network devices live under /org/freedesktop/NetworkManager/Devices/:

list_objects(
    bus="system",
    service="org.freedesktop.NetworkManager",
    root_path="/org/freedesktop/NetworkManager/Devices"
)

Then introspect a specific device to see which interfaces it exposes (Wired, Wireless, Statistics) and read their properties.