[Nut-upsuser] The dreaded Tripp Lite SMART500RT1U and NUT

[Charles Lepple]

On Thu, Jun 26, 2014 at 10:20 PM, Steve Ballantyne
<steve.ballantyne at gmail.com> wrote:
>> However, we don't have all of the 09AE/0001 protocols decoded in the
>> tripplite_usb driver.
>
> I can try to help out on this front?  :-)

Definitely.

>> >    9.783126     Unknown input voltage range: 0x02
>> >    9.783308     Unknown number of switchable load banks: 0x01
>>
>> Is this a 230V unit? Again, it's looking for the ASCII version of 0x02
>> (which would be 0x32)
>
> Nope, this is a standard 120V, for a standard grounded outlet.
> Although I suppose perhaps they could have shared some of the guts of
> this from larger units that are 220/230v?

Well, that number scales some of the voltages. Not much we can do
until we find out more about the other values.

> I can most definitely connect this to a Windows PC.  Just let me know
> what I can provide you.

The ideal situation is a trace of all the USB commands that the
Windows software sends. However, I think this is just a binary version
of the 3003 protocol, so experimenting might be easier.

Most important are the "OB" and "LB" status bits. Unfortunately, there
is no good way to generate the LB signal besides running the battery
down. You might need more than a Raspberry Pi to do this in short
order. I like to use incandescent lights instead of computers for test
loads, because if the UPS pulls power at an inopportune time, you
won't have nearly as much filesystem damage on a light bulb.

I think the 'M' command shows the min and max voltages - see if there
is something similar in the Windows display.

Also, any load values would be helpful.

For a 500W UPS, I assume it's one 12V (or 2x 6V) battery pack?

Attached is a patch to try to map some of the 3005 differences into
the driver. It should apply to the NUT 2.7.2 tarball, but it was
generated from the Git master branch. If you do check out from Github,
you'll need to install autoconf, automake and libtool. AsciiDoc is
pretty slow, so you can pass "--without-doc" to the ./configure
script. You may also want to add "--with-drivers=tripplite_usb" so
that it doesn't try to compile everything.

-- 
- Charles Lepple
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