Controller Battery Monitor

Well when I first started the site some 5 years ago, I didn’t expect to be writing about my own pieces of software. I’ve been pretty handy with websites and sql over the years, and Terminal is my best friend as we all know, but sitting down in front of Xcode to solve a problem has never been on my todo list or even radar.

With the emergence of high power Ai models nothing is beyond the realm of impossible these days, I knew what I wanted, I had some kind of idea how to get there but joining up the middle pieces was never going to happen on my own.

Image : Cornfox & Brothers Ltd.

The problem was, mid “gaming” session playing Oceanhorn 2: Knights of the Lost Realm on the AppleTV my DualShock Playstation controller battery died and to be honest I’ve never really known how much battery life has been left since the day I got it. After googling and searching many of the known “indie” and/or “nerdy” software libraries drawing a blank, I cracked on to make my own.

MacOS does have some level of information available in system settings under Bluetooth and Game Controllers but it’s hidden, battery information is only shown when plugged in via usb, knowing this, if I could then use swift to pull the information? 5 hours later and more back and forth with Ai then I care to remember and Battery Controller Monitor was born.

v1.0 of the app is available from the software page it’ll work with all newer generation game controllers which macOS can pull information from, there are no known bugs or gremlins and I'm looking at adding a few features in v2.0 in the spring of 2026.