[Nut-upsdev] RunTimeToEmpty is in minutes or seconds?

[Greg Troxel]

Kelly Byrd <kbyrd at memcpy.com> writes:

> Looking through a bunch of the code for drivers using HID, It looks like
> everyone is using "ups.powersummary.runtimetoempty" to map to NUT's
> "battery.runtime" variable.
>
> My question for you all is what units ups.powersummary.runtimetoempty is
> supposed to be in? This doc from USB.org:
> https://www.usb.org/sites/default/files/hut1_4.pdf (Section 31.2) says
> minutes, but the NUT developer docs:
> https://networkupstools.org/docs/developer-guide.chunked/apas02.html
> (Section A.3) says battery.runtime is in seconds.

In my experience, the Best Fortress driver does translate the front
panel display in minutes and seconds to seconds in battery.runtime.
That is not a USB device.

I htink it's very important that the NUT variables have the same
semantics regardless of driver so that programs/humans that use the data
can just use it without knowing how the device misrepresents it.

To me the big question is

  Given that the standard says minutes, what do actual UPS devices do?
  Do they follow the standard, or do they stick seconds in that field?
  Do the values in the field, interpreted as minutes, make sense
  physically?  Do they match the display?

and that once that is answered, we can decide what to do, which might be
"have a quirk table for buggy devices that put minutes in the seconds
field", or an anti-quirk table for the one known device that gets it
right.

> Is this just a case where real world UPS' are using seconds so we're stuck
> with it now? I guess it's being pedantic, but IMO trying to measure a UPS
> remaining runtime with accuracy is sort of silly.

I agree that believing seconds accuracy is a bit silly but that's a
somewhat different question from "should the units for this variable
(which we express as a an integer with no fractions) be seconds or
minutes"/?  Arguing for seconds is that it's the SI base unit, and that
if somehow does know seconds, it's useful.  I can see a UPS with a
lithium ion battery at high loads validly having a runtime of "30s" at
some point.  No, I wouldn't believe 29s vs 30s.


> I noticed this because I'm cobbling together a personal project that
> has absurd capacity for the load, somewhere around 2-3 days from a
> fully charged battery and I'm using NUT's Arduino driver to report
> things. It's not critical that I be able to communicate that much
> remaining time, but I wanted to ask here about the difference.

There's no theoretical problem expressing 3 days in seconds, so I'm
guessing this is field size?  Are you running into battery.runtime being
expressed as a uint16_t?

I get your point that if runtime is 3 days and it is represented as
65535s, that "there is a lot of battery left and nothing to do for low
battery now".