[Nut-upsuser] Interfacing with Siemens SITOP UPS500S

[Charles Lepple]

On Mar 14, 2018, at 7:26 AM, Berge, Matthijs ten wrote:
> 
> Can anyone point me in the right direction where I should start? I already found http://networkupstools.org/docs/developer-guide.chunked/ar01s04.html, but it doesn't give any specific tips for serial communication. For example, which source can I use best as a starting point?
> Or does anyone recognize this protocol, and is it already compatible with an existing driver?
> 
Those strings don't show up in a quick search of the driver source code, so it looks like you are correct in that you will need to write a new driver.

A little further down on the page you cited is the list of serial functions provided by NUT (Section 4.11). There are also a few contrived serial examples in drivers/skel.c, which we recommend copying as a starting point for a driver.

This is all assuming that your OS recognizes the FTDI chip as a USB-to-serial converter, and creates the appropriate character device (for instance, /dev/ttyUSB* on Linux). There are other USB drivers in NUT that communicate with non-kernel-supported USB-to-serial converters, but there are complications with wrestling the USB interface away from the kernel driver, so I'd advise against that if you can help it.

I don't recall any other drivers which parse a continuous stream of data without sending a query command. For a query/response example, ivtscd.c is relatively straightforward to understand.

Given the fixed-length strings and unambiguity of the commands, you might want a loop like the following:

ser_flush_in()
while(!done && !timed_out) {
    ser_get_char()
    // append to buffer
    check for match
    check for timeout
}

One thing that may be useful while waiting for hardware is to embed a test harness in the code. We don't have much of a standard for this, but as long as the code doesn't turn into spaghetti, feel free to use something like "#ifdef TESTING" to allow the driver to be tested offline.

If you do need to do systems-level testing before the driver is complete, you may be interested in the dummy-ups driver. It allows you to write a script of the data you expect the SITOP driver to return, and then test system shutdown or notifications. Obviously, this requires making a number of assumptions about the UPS, but it is a starting point if you want to allow some parallel development.

http://new.networkupstools.org/docs/man/dummy-ups.html or if the build infrastructure is being cranky,
http://networkupstools.org/docs/man/dummy-ups.html

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