Show Omega2 Battery Voltage in OpenWrt LuCI

Sometime ago, I bought an Onion Omega2 Pro and flashed it with OpenWrt 18.06. I plan to take my Omega on the road, so I installed a Li-Po battery on the device, so that it does not need to depend on USB power input. One big question is: what's the remaining power level?

Install power-dock2 to View Battery Voltage

The standalone Power Dock has a set of battery indicator LEDs that visually tells how much juice is left. However, the Omega2 Pro that I have does not have battery indicators. Instead, I need to use power-dock2 command to read battery level. Let me try it:

root@Omega2:~# power-dock2
-ash: power-dock2: not found

It does not work, because I flashed my Omega with OpenWrt 18.06, and power-dock2 command is not included in the standard OpenWrt distribution. The command comes from OnionIoT's OpenWrt feed (package source). I must add the OpenWrt feed before I can install the power-dock2 package.

To add the OnionIoT feed to OpenWrt:

1. Append the feed configuration to /etc/opkg/distfeeds.conf:

   echo src/gz omega2_onion http://repo.onion.io/omega2/packages/onion | tee -a /etc/opkg/distfeeds.conf

2. Disable opkg signature check, because we don't yet have Onion's signing keys.

   sed -i '/check_signature/ s/^/#/' /etc/opkg.conf

3. Refresh package feeds and install Onion signing keys.

   opkg update
   opkg install onion-repo-keys

4. Enable opkg signature check, as now we have the signing keys.

   sed -i '/check_signature/ s/^#//' /etc/opkg.conf

5. Refresh package feeds again, so that the package list is updated with the newly installed signing key.

   opkg update

Now we are ready to install packages from Onion's OpenWrt feed. Unfortunately, the power-dock2 package did not properly declare its dependencies, so that a simple opkg install power-dock2 would not work. However, it's easy enough to figure out the correct dependencies. The command of installing power-dock2 and necessary dependencies is:

opkg install kmod-i2c-mt7628 i2c-tools power-dock2

After this, I can see my battery voltage via command line:

root@Omega2:~# power-dock2
Battery Voltage Level: 3.66 V

Display Battery Level on LuCI

LuCI is OpenWrt's web user interface. It is written in Lua programming language, designed to be extensible and easily maintainable, and structured as an Model-View-Controller (MVC) web framework.

I am still learning LuCI, but I have figured out the simplest way to display battery level on LuCI's homepage: Create a file /usr/lib/lua/luci/view/admin_status/index/powerdock2.htm, and paste the following code:

<%-
  require "string"
  require "luci.sys"
  local powerdock2_output = luci.sys.exec("power-dock2")
  powerdock2_output = string.gsub(powerdock2_output, "Battery Voltage Level: ", "")
-%>

<div class="cbi-section">
  <h3><%:Omega2 - Power Dock%></h3>

  <div class="table" width="100%">
    <div class="tr"><div class="td left" width="33%"><%:Battery Voltage Level%></div><div class="td left" id="powerdock2_output"><%=powerdock2_output%></div></div>
  </div>
</div>

This code invokes power-dock2 command, parses its output, and displays the result on the webpage.

Login to Omega's LuCI, and I can see the battery level at bottom of the page:

It works because:

1. The "homepage" is actually "status overview".
2. The page template is /usr/lib/lua/luci/view/admin_status/index.htm.
3. At the end of this template, the code includes every .htm file in /usr/lib/lua/luci/view/admin_status/index/ directory.
4. Therefore, I can put a file into this directory to insert a new section at the end of LuCI homepage.

I have noticed two limitation in my current approach. First, when I keep the "status overview" page open, system and network statistics are updated automatically, but the battery level information I added would not refresh. Second, the code shows battery voltage, but it would be nice to know battery percentage. I will improve on these aspects next time.