[Nut-upsdev] Specs for Powercom Kingpro UPSes!

[Dan Mahoney, System Admin]

On Sun, 24 Dec 2006, Arjen de Korte wrote:

> Dan Mahoney, System Admin wrote:
>
>> I found a pinout of powercom's Kingpro UPSes in their manual.
>>
>> http://www.powercom-ups.com/manuals/kingpro.pdf
>>
>> Page 11.
>
> Good! Looking at this page, this UPS may be supported already by the
> (dumb) genericups driver. This won't give you all the bells-and-whistles
> the UPS has, but will provide the basic function of monitoring and
> shutting down when the battery is nearly empty. Unfortunately the manual
> doesn't list the pins on the serial connector to the PC, otherwise I
> might have been able to give you the correct driver parameters right away.

well, for what it's worth, I know the cable is a straight-through, and m-f 
(female on the PC side, male on the UPS side).

> A good start would probably be 'upstype=15'. The contacts on battery-
> and line-state are normally open, so you'd expect the corresponding
> RS-232 lines to be logic '0' when online/battery good and logic '1' when
> onbattery/battery low. The level of the UPS shutdown signal is high
> (logic '0') which equals a break signal, so I would expect that this pin
> is already wired correctly since it is also used in smart mode.

I'm not too sure on the "modal" differences.

Hrmmm, actually, I'm going to be monitoring several UPSes (like, six per 
PC). with a multi-port serial card, so it's far more important to me to 
get an email saying something flashed, rather than properly shutting down. 
If I was looking for gravy, I'd also be looking for some sort of 
indication that the UPS was on "boost" status (i.e. providing additional 
voltage to augment line power -- this is a common occurence when using 
generator).  I don't know if the protocol is event-driven, or 
poller-based.

> Genericups expects the cable power, online and battery low signals on
> DTR, CTS and DCD respectively, so you may need to override these if they
> are different on the cable provided. See 'man genericups' for more details.
>
>> 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).
>
> Assuming that the existing Powercom driver doesn't work with your UPS,
> we have a protocol description from Powercom (it was posted recently
> here). You could also check if modifying the driver to this description
> makes it work.

The powercom driver doesn't work, tried it long ago, got nothing.

I saw the driver-post, but wasn't at all sure how to read it.  How hard is 
it to modify a UPS driver?  I know zero C, but if it's just a textfile 
with parameters I can take a crack at it.

-Dan


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--------Dan Mahoney--------
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