[Nut-upsdev] Specs for Powercom Kingpro UPSes!

[Charles Lepple]

On 12/21/06, Dan Mahoney, System Admin <danm at prime.gushi.org> wrote:
> Unfortunately, this doesn't give PROTOCOL details.  Does anyone have a
> "first step" at how to decode that?  (for example, how to gauge line
> speed, how to "snoop" the serial port under windows? (for which the only
> software exists right now).

I have had great success with this tool:

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/Utilities/Portmon.mspx

The log will contain information such as baud rate changes, and other
serial port settings.

I haven't used it since Microsoft acquired Sysinternals, but with the
older versions, I found it helpful to turn on the hex display of data
(otherwise, some characters will be recorded ambiguously).

There are a number of posts to this list on reverse-engineering
protocols (in the name of DMCA interoperability, of course), but the
basic idea is:

* plug a dummy load into the UPS while testing (so you don't crash
your development machine if it turns off unexpectedly)
* Run the batteries down a little past the low-battery point, so you
can see the difference between "on battery" and "low battery".
* Record what is happening at a given time, so that you can deduce
things like battery charge from the logs.

-- 
- Charles Lepple