[Nut-upsdev] Fwd: RE New xanto driver for NUT

[Andreas Thienemann]

Hello Carlos,

On Fri, 12 May 2006, Carlos Rodrigues wrote:

> Hmm, I searched my mail archives and found that thread. The absense of
> the "F" command does pose some problems, but I'm open to suggestions.
Well, back when I wrote that driver, I sniffed the serial communication 
which looked very much Megatec to me.

After I spent a bit of time on the protocol, I got a call from one of the
developers at Generex, the company which developed DataWatch the bundled
USV software.
This guy was very helpful as he sent me a pdf detailing the serial
protocol. As it's classified, I cannot just forward it to the list or
quote from, but Online-USV was perfectly happy with me writing an
Open-Source driver.

I just took a look at the specs again to compare them to the Megatec 
Protocol.
There is no way of querying the UPS which kind it is. Nothing.
There is also no way of getting the UPS ratings from the device. Not 
implemented.
And then, there are a few extensions to the protocol in order to switch 
the UPS to line-mode and bypass.

Thus it might be possible to extend the megatec driver, to support the 
online-usvs. However, that would mean that there will have to be a lot of 
special cases be included and some assumptions to be made.

I'm not sure, if it is worth spending time to make a generic driver more 
complex or if it's just easier to say, we can make the generic driver work 
with all easily detectable devices, and for everything else, we'll just 
use seperate drivers.
But that's your call, I do not know how complicated it would be to adapt 
the current megatec codebase.

bye,
 andreas


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