[Nut-upsdev] PowerWalker UPS

[Charles Lepple]

On Dec 1, 2011, at 10:28 AM, Jörg Bous wrote:

> Dear Nut-UPSdev Team,
>  
> First of all I would like to appreciate the great job you are doing.
> Your work is very important and helpful for all UPS users.
>  
> I found that you show compatibility with blazer_ser and blazer_usb for six of our models.
> Please inform me how we can make it happen that all our models become compatible?
 
Generally, we get reports from users or developers who own the equipment, and can test new code against the hardware.

If you or someone else at your company who could help with that testing, we would be happy to work with you.

This is the information that we'd like to have to add a model to the compatibility list:

   http://www.networkupstools.org/stable-hcl.html#footnotes

Since NUT is open source software, ideally the software would be derived from open specifications. I am not familiar with the blazer* drivers in particular, but if a user came to us with an issue, it would be more difficult to debug since I don't see any specifications for the protocol in our protocol reference library:

   http://www.networkupstools.org/ups-protocols.html

   http://old.networkupstools.org/protocols/

On the other hand, if your company can help with any problems we run across, that would probably be sufficient.

> Who from your team added the compatibility with PowerWalker VI 850 LCD?

Here's the start of the discussion thread:

   http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/nut-upsuser/2011-June/006863.html
 
> Last question: Is there any way to make it happen that our products become compatible with the usbhid_ups module?

The usbhid-ups driver was meant to handle any device which conforms to the openly-available USB HID Power Device Class (PDC) specification:

   http://www.usb.org/developers/devclass_docs/pdcv10.pdf

(Note that this is very different than UPSes which claim to be HID devices so that they can be easily controlled by user-space programs in Windows [prior to the introduction of WinUSB]. If the UPS has a simple USB-to-serial converter inside, or if it requires a kernel driver in Windows, it is probably not HID PDC compliant.)

However, due to variations in each manufacturer's interpretation of the HID PDC spec, we can't automatically work with any HID PDC UPS. There is an "explore" mode which helps us map out the UPS variables and settings. With that information, we can add a new HID subdriver to usbhid-ups.

   http://www.networkupstools.org/docs/man/usbhid-ups.html

If your engineers need to develop HID PDC support, be sure that they select a unique USB Product ID to make it easier to distinguish the device from those supported by blazer_usb. Also, I would encourage them not to just copy the HID Usage Tables that other vendors provide, since many of them contain subtle bugs that we have to then work around.

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Thanks,

-- 
Charles Lepple
clepple at gmail