Nut upsuser - Oct 2007 - Working UPS report: Geek Squad GS-700U (Cyberpower clone?)

Hi,

I wanted to report some success with monitoring this UPS, a "Geek
Squad"
brand GS-700U that I purchased earlier this year from Best Buy Canada.  
Information about this... thing is very scarce so here is what I know:

The unit itself is probably made by Cyberpower.  It has a 9-pin serial 
port on the UPS, as well as a serial-USB adapter thing.  I cracked open 
the serial-USB adapter and printed on the PCB inside is "CYBERPOWER USB 
1.7" which was a major tip-off. 

I'm using nut 2.2.0 on a Pepper Pad 2 - which is a UMPC type device 
based off of an Intel XScale CPU with a modified version of  MontaVista 
Linux Pro 3.1. (Linux kernel 2.6.13.4, gcc 3.4, *no* udev).  The serial 
port I used was actually a Belkin F5U103 USB to Serial port adapter.  I 
compiled nut against libusb 0.1.12.

Using the serial cable connected to a serial port, I was able to get NUT 
monitoring it with the "genericups" driver with upstype=7 (CyberPower 
Power99).  At lease, the On-Line / On Battery status works with this 
upstype setting - I haven't yet tested any of the other signals.

The serial-USB thing is identified as 0764:0005 on the USB bus, which is 
supposed to be identified by usbhid-ups.  However, when trying to use it 
I got USBDEVFS control errors in the system logs, the same as this 
previous post:

http://osdir.com/ml/monitoring.nut.user/2006-07/msg00061.html

I also tried the cyberpower driver and cpsups driver with no luck.

I have never tried to use the included Windows software that came with 
the UPS, so I don't know if it even supports non-contact closure 
features like voltages, load percentages, etc.  I suppose I could try it 
out in a VMWare virtual machine running XP and see what it does...

-- 
Victor Rehorst - chuma at chuma.org - victor at newtontalk.net
Personal Homepage - http://www.chuma.org/

Quoting Victor Rehorst <chuma at chuma.org>:
> I wanted to report some success with monitoring this UPS, a "Geek
Squad"
> brand GS-700U that I purchased earlier this year from Best Buy Canada.
> Information about this... thing is very scarce so here is what I know:
>
> The unit itself is probably made by Cyberpower.  It has a 9-pin serial
> port on the UPS, as well as a serial-USB adapter thing.  I cracked open
> the serial-USB adapter and printed on the PCB inside is "CYBERPOWER
USB
> 1.7" which was a major tip-off.
>
> I'm using nut 2.2.0 on a Pepper Pad 2 - which is a UMPC type device
> based off of an Intel XScale CPU with a modified version of  MontaVista
> Linux Pro 3.1. (Linux kernel 2.6.13.4, gcc 3.4, *no* udev).  The serial
> port I used was actually a Belkin F5U103 USB to Serial port adapter.  I
> compiled nut against libusb 0.1.12.
>
> Using the serial cable connected to a serial port, I was able to get NUT
> monitoring it with the "genericups" driver with upstype=7
(CyberPower
> Power99).  At lease, the On-Line / On Battery status works with this
> upstype setting - I haven't yet tested any of the other signals.
>
> The serial-USB thing is identified as 0764:0005 on the USB bus, which is
> supposed to be identified by usbhid-ups.  However, when trying to use it
> I got USBDEVFS control errors in the system logs, the same as this
> previous post:
>
> http://osdir.com/ml/monitoring.nut.user/2006-07/msg00061.html
>
> I also tried the cyberpower driver and cpsups driver with no luck.
>
> I have never tried to use the included Windows software that came with
> the UPS, so I don't know if it even supports non-contact closure
> features like voltages, load percentages, etc.  I suppose I could try it
> out in a VMWare virtual machine running XP and see what it does...
Have you tried the PowerPanel driver?  It is the successor to the  
mostly defunct cpsups driver.  It is named after the Windows software.  
  Most (if not all?) of the geek squad devices are a repackaged  
cyberpower units.  If it has a serial port, the powerpanel driver  
should work 100%.


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> I'm using nut 2.2.0 on a Pepper Pad 2 - which is a UMPC type device
> based off of an Intel XScale CPU with a modified version of  MontaVista
> Linux Pro 3.1. (Linux kernel 2.6.13.4, gcc 3.4, *no* udev).
If you don't have udev/hotplug available, there will be no way to change
the ownership of the device to the compiled in NUT user. You need to run
the usbhid-ups driver as 'root' (and consequently, the upsd server too)
by
adding '-u root' to the startup command line. Changing the permissions
of
the USB device by hand may appear to work initially, but will break as
soon as the driver needs to reconnect (which may never happen, or as often
as every half hour or even more frequently).

[...]
> The serial-USB thing is identified as 0764:0005 on the USB bus, which is
> supposed to be identified by usbhid-ups.  However, when trying to use it
> I got USBDEVFS control errors in the system logs, the same as this
> previous post:
>
> http://osdir.com/ml/monitoring.nut.user/2006-07/msg00061.html
This is almost certainly a permissions problem. We have reports from
people that have UPS'es with this VID:PID working with the usbhid-ups
driver, so the driver should work. It is indeed a rebranded CyberPower
unit.

Best regards, Arjen
-- 
Eindhoven - The Netherlands
Key fingerprint - 66 4E 03 2C 9D B5 CB 9B  7A FE 7E C1 EE 88 BC 57