[Nut-upsdev] Specs for Powercom Kingpro UPSes!

[Arjen de Korte]

Dan Mahoney, System Admin wrote:

>> 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).

The cable can't be straight-through. Neither pin 4 nor pin 7 are ground
on a DB-9 connector (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RS232), so there
must be some swapping of pins. There is no way you can change the
pinning of serial ports by software. You can only change around some
input (or output signals), but you can't make an output from an input
(or vice versa). Also, the schematic shown already indicates pin changes
between the male (UPS) and female (PC) side connectors, meaning this is
a specific cable, not a straight through one. The interesting thing to
know, is where pins 2, 3, 5, and 9 of the UPS connector are connected to
on the PC side. A simple resistance check (with an inexpensive
multimeter) should be enough.

>> A good start would probably be 'upstype=15'.

Or 'upstype=20' if the levels are reversed somehow.

>> 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.

I'm not sure what you mean here (no native speaker), but if I were you,
I would just try the genericups driver (either upstype=15 or if that
doesn't work upstype=20). Provided you know you have a special cable and
not just a generic straight through one. One word of caution, don't use
the UPS to power an actual system and second, you only want to be
running the driver and upsd. Do NOT run upsmon to prevent it from
shutting down your system.

> 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 you only need a simple good/bad indication, genericups should be more
than enough (it would also be able to switch the UPS off).

> 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.

Most of the time, smart protocols are poller based. Which means that the
monitoring application (NUT in our case) queries for a status and the
UPS replies with a status. Genericups just uses dumb signalling, so it
looks at the level of a control line (most of the time CTS and DCD,
althoug RNG is also used sometimes).

[...]

> 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.

This driver will need some C-programming. There are many people on this
list that are more than capable of coding in C, but unfortunately you'd
need a UPS for testing, so this is a dead end.

Best regards, Arjen