make battery charging/discharging status visible to Home Assistant

[liblit]

If a device is powered by a rechargeable battery, then it can be useful to know whether that battery is currently charging or discharging. For example, this information can be used to show different icons in dashboards. Battery-powered BTN-1 devices do not currently provide this information. Presumably the underlying hardware "knows" whether it is plugged in or not, but this information is not visible to Home Assistant.

Please make this information visible somehow. For example, it might be exposed via a new binary_sensor or via a new attribute of the existing battery-level sensor. My impression is that the most common style is to have a binary_sensor with device_class: battery_charging. But there are also integrations that use various attributes for this info. It's worth looking around and figuring out what makes the most sense for devices like BTN-1.

Aside: any Apollo device with a rechargeable battery could benefit from this feature, not just BTN-1.

[bharvey88]

Thanks for posting this issue. Unfortunately, this requires a PCB change (exposing a pin to esphome) which will likely only be possible on future revisions.

We are unable to add a workaround in yaml as it would be more of a hacky solution and not a real fix to the problem.

Thanks again for your support and let us know if you run in to any other issues!

[liblit]

Oh well. Thanks for the explanation, @bharvey88. I agree that a hacky YAML workaround would be the wrong approach.

Maybe this request can just be kept in mind for future product revisions and designs.

[bharvey88]

Oh well. Thanks for the explanation, @bharvey88. I agree that a hacky YAML workaround would be the wrong approach.

Maybe this request can just be kept in mind for future product revisions and designs.

Thanks I have shared this with the co-founders to consider adding this feature going forward on new products!