Dan Mahoney, System Admin
2006-Dec-21 17:12 UTC
[Nut-upsdev] Specs for Powercom Kingpro UPSes!
Hey all, I found a pinout of powercom's Kingpro UPSes in their manual. http://www.powercom-ups.com/manuals/kingpro.pdf Page 11. Unfortunately, this doesn't give PROTOCOL details. Does anyone have a "first step" at how to decode that? (for example, how to gauge line speed, how to "snoop" the serial port under windows? (for which the only software exists right now). -Dan -- "What's with the server farm down in the basement?" -Spider, Three Skulls Commons at Selden House, 4/15/00 --------Dan Mahoney-------- Techie, Sysadmin, WebGeek Gushi on efnet/undernet IRC ICQ: 13735144 AIM: LarpGM Site: http://www.gushi.org ---------------------------
On 12/21/06, Dan Mahoney, System Admin <danm@prime.gushi.org> wrote:> Unfortunately, this doesn't give PROTOCOL details. Does anyone have a > "first step" at how to decode that? (for example, how to gauge line > speed, how to "snoop" the serial port under windows? (for which the only > software exists right now).I have had great success with this tool: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/Utilities/Portmon.mspx The log will contain information such as baud rate changes, and other serial port settings. I haven't used it since Microsoft acquired Sysinternals, but with the older versions, I found it helpful to turn on the hex display of data (otherwise, some characters will be recorded ambiguously). There are a number of posts to this list on reverse-engineering protocols (in the name of DMCA interoperability, of course), but the basic idea is: * plug a dummy load into the UPS while testing (so you don't crash your development machine if it turns off unexpectedly) * Run the batteries down a little past the low-battery point, so you can see the difference between "on battery" and "low battery". * Record what is happening at a given time, so that you can deduce things like battery charge from the logs. -- - Charles Lepple
Dan Mahoney, System Admin wrote:> I found a pinout of powercom's Kingpro UPSes in their manual. > > http://www.powercom-ups.com/manuals/kingpro.pdf > > Page 11.Good! Looking at this page, this UPS may be supported already by the (dumb) genericups driver. This won't give you all the bells-and-whistles the UPS has, but will provide the basic function of monitoring and shutting down when the battery is nearly empty. Unfortunately the manual doesn't list the pins on the serial connector to the PC, otherwise I might have been able to give you the correct driver parameters right away. A good start would probably be 'upstype=15'. The contacts on battery- and line-state are normally open, so you'd expect the corresponding RS-232 lines to be logic '0' when online/battery good and logic '1' when onbattery/battery low. The level of the UPS shutdown signal is high (logic '0') which equals a break signal, so I would expect that this pin is already wired correctly since it is also used in smart mode. Genericups expects the cable power, online and battery low signals on DTR, CTS and DCD respectively, so you may need to override these if they are different on the cable provided. See 'man genericups' for more details.> Unfortunately, this doesn't give PROTOCOL details. Does anyone have a > "first step" at how to decode that? (for example, how to gauge line > speed, how to "snoop" the serial port under windows? (for which the only > software exists right now).Assuming that the existing Powercom driver doesn't work with your UPS, we have a protocol description from Powercom (it was posted recently here). You could also check if modifying the driver to this description makes it work. Best regards, Arjen