[Nut-upsdev] Fwd: [networkupstools/nut] Support for MicroLink APC UPSs (Issue #1426)

[Eetu Rasilainen]

Hi there,

I am the user who opened the GitHub issue regarding APC-MicroLink UPS 
support.

On 5/14/2022 Ted Mittelstaedt wrote:

 > I'll ask the obvious which is wouldn't it be easier to write a driver
 > for NUT that would exec python code (or other scripting languages)
 > that talked to the UPS?

official support for Python-based drivers sounds like a great idea. If 
this was somehow supported I would instantly start working on a 
MicroLink-driver based on the awesome reverse engineering work provided 
by GitHub user klaasdc.

Shouldn't this be pretty straightforward? I have also tried to start 
working on a C version, but I failed miserably. This is really not my 
environment. I guess a good starting point could be Python's "ctypes" 
module, which allows for calling C routines. Does anybody have any 
experience with that?

And as Ted mentioned, Python bindings for drivers would open up the 
world for web scrapers and all those fancy things. What are the general 
thoughts about Python driver bindings?

On the other hand I can see that you guys want to keep NUT as small and 
clean as possible. And especially APC's new MicroLink protocol is rather 
trivial so technically there is no hard requirement to use a full-blown 
scripting language for this. It's more of a strategic question whether 
you'd like to encourage more users to write drivers quickly.

So the questions are:

#1 Does anybody see Python drivers (or external drivers in general) as a 
realistic option in the future?

#2 Or is anybody willing to work on a native MicroLink driver with my 
assistance? As I have already mentioned I am not familiar with C, so 
what I could do is rewrite the current Python MicroLink implementation 
to match the data structures and data flows expected by NUT. This means 
I could create a driver.py which contains Python functions like 
"upsdrv_initinfo", "upsdrv_updateinfo", "instcmd", "setvar", etc. Then 
somebody would only need to do the 1:1 porting to C.

#3 Or is there actually anybody who is accepting the challenge of 
porting the current MicroLink Python implementation on his/her own? I 
could still help with testing in that case of course.

I have also already thought of using "dummyups" with a file generated by 
a standalone Python driver, which regularly writes values to a text 
file. The issue with that is that NUT cannot send any commands to the 
UPS that way. But the "dummyups" could probably also serve as a hook for 
external drivers if only it would support setvar/instcmd hooks for those 
external drivers.


Kind regards,
Eetu