nc://brownout

Brownout: notices when this machine loses mains power, measures battery runway, and parks tool calls until power is back. A Nodecode rewrite of Osiyomeoh/brownout by Osiyomeoh.

Built for places where the grid is unreliable, and for anyone running a laptop, a home server or a UPS as the machine the agent works on.

Brownout watches the host's power and, when mains power drops:

1. Says so, in a standing notice every attached shell shows and the agent reads in its next request, with the charge and the OS's own time-left estimate.
2. Measures the real drain from the percent drops it has seen, and says the runway a few minutes later — the number the cell acts on.
3. Parks the work: reply /brownout park and every tool call is held, or it parks itself at critical_pct (or critical_minutes of measured runway) when nobody answers.
4. Picks up again when power returns, or on /brownout resume. Nothing is killed, deleted or stopped mid-write; a park is only a hold.

Get it

Tell the agent "add the brownout cell", or run:

nodecode add nc://brownout

Set it up

Nothing is required. The defaults poll every 15 s and park themselves at 15% or 10 minutes of runway.

{
  "brownout": {
    "poll_seconds": 15,       // how fast a power loss is noticed
    "critical_pct": 15,       // park itself at or below this charge
    "critical_minutes": 10,   // ...or below this measured runway
    "auto_resume": true,      // let tool calls through when power returns
    "ups": "",                // a NUT UPS name for upsc; empty reads the OS
    "allow_when_parked": []   // tools that still run while parked
  }
}

There is no key and no account: the reading comes from the host itself — pmset -g batt on macOS, /sys/class/power_supply on Linux, or upsc <name> for a UPS that nut already knows. A machine with no battery (most desktops, containers, remote boxes) has no reading, and the cell says so instead of guessing.

Use it

The model has the same verbs as one tool, brownout (status, park, keep, resume, test), so it can check the host, or park itself before a long job.

Do this: unplug the charger. See this: at the next poll the notice "power lost on this machine. Battery …" stands, and the runway follows a few minutes later. /brownout park, and the next tool call comes back refused; plug in and the call runs again.

No hardware to unplug? Record a trace and replay it with no side effects:

# one line per reading: {"t": <seconds>, "on_ac": true|false, "pct": <0-100>}
/brownout replay traces/laptop-outage.jsonl

A trace is a plain JSONL of readings, so a trace recorded on one platform replays on another; the replay performs nothing and posts no notice.