[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:
>
>>> 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.

Hrmmm, but the cable works as an extension for other serial cables.

-Dan

>
>>> 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
>

--

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-Dan Mahoney
  12/2/02



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