[Nut-upsdev] bestfortress driver establishes/loses/establishes communication and so on...

[Arnaud Quette]

2012/2/7 Oliver Kluge <ok23 at kluge-digital.de>:
> Hi Arnaud,

Hi Oliver,

> if you got tons of material including several protocol revisions, maybe a
> broader approach might useful?

this is to be expected from me.

> I don't want to talk you into rewriting all this code, but I see space for
> some improvement and let my imagination run wild :-) Nut drivers make a
> difference between Fortresses and "newer Fortresses" without really drawing
> a sharp line.

that's the aim.

> Are those different protocols fundamentally different? I mean, is a division
> of different Fortress models into two separate nut drivers actually
> indicated? Is there a revolutionary change instead of evolution?

I don't see a revolution, but indeed an evolution.

> If not, what about joining the two? If yes, could the division line which
> model needs which driver be made more visible? Or could the driver instruct
> the user to it's counterpart if the user chose the wrong one?
>
> Wow, all these changes must have meant tons of work for the engineers of
> those days, bearing in mind that a UPS with such capabilities needed a PCB
> full of circuits. And indeed the Fortress has a really large PCB compared to
> contemporary models. And in those days there were no firmware updates.
> Firmware was forever and essentially had to be bugfree (maybe we should
> re-vitalize that old paradigm :-) I'm not sure if I saw even an EPROM in
> there, maybe the code is inside the processor...
>
> At the time when this thing was built, if somebody would have told that a
> time would come where I would update the firmware of my phone, my VCR and my
> TV every couple of months :-)
>
> And at the time you had to support a bunch of operating systems, there were
> unix versions, Windows, an OS/2 version. I'm quite amazed that the Checkups
> Windows driver even runs on 7 and Vista, even 64 bit...

good ol' engineering!

> Sorry, I just got a little side-tracked :-)

no problem, it's always good for health ;-)


I've just started studying these docs, so no news yet...

cheers,
Arnaud
-- 
Linux / Unix Expert R&D - Eaton - http://powerquality.eaton.com
Network UPS Tools (NUT) Project Leader - http://www.networkupstools.org/
Debian Developer - http://www.debian.org
Free Software Developer - http://arnaud.quette.free.fr/