Nut upsuser - Mar 2008 - 24V DC ATX PSU with limited UPS functionality over USB

Hello Developers and *,

I am working on a "24V DC ATX PSU" for Photopholtaik Systems which can
have input voltages from 18V to 27.7 Volt and is entirely modular,
which mean, you can select the desired module/s (up to 6) from ATX
(96/144/240/300W), P4 (144W), SATA (82/305W) and Device (34/68/136W)

And last not least, I want to build a "PowerWhatch" module which
should
be connected from the PSU to an internal USB port of the mainboard.

Currently I do not know, whether I should use Maxims 1-Wire chips like
the DS2450 which has four AD-Converter or a I?C/SMBus solution.  Both
will work with the DS80C411 Microcontroller...

Now the question to you:

Since I do not want to reinvent the wheel, I like to use existing
programs where I think, NUT is the perfect solution...  The problem is,
HOW I have to deliver the data to it or how must I provide it?

The "PowerWhatch" module picks only the Voltage and Amperes and
Temperature from each of the 11 modules... and maybe it will store them
for a while in a 8-16 kByte NV-RAM or something like this...

If you have ideas or suggestions, please let me know.

Greetings and Nice Day
    Michelle Konzack
    Systemadministrator
    24V DC Electronic Engineer
    Tamay Dogan Network
    Debian GNU/Linux Consultant


-- 
Linux-User #280138 with the Linux Counter, http://counter.li.org/
##################### Debian GNU/Linux Consultant #####################
Michelle Konzack   Apt. 917                  ICQ #328449886
+49/177/9351947    50, rue de Soultz         MSN LinuxMichi
+33/6/61925193     67100 Strasbourg/France   IRC #Debian (irc.icq.com)
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[this is probably more of a nut-upsdev thread, but I'll let you switch
it if you decide to go down this road.]

On Tue, Mar 11, 2008 at 11:22 AM, Michelle Konzack
<linux4michelle at freenet.de> wrote:
>  And last not least, I want to build a "PowerWhatch" module which
should
>  be connected from the PSU to an internal USB port of the mainboard.
[...]
>  Since I do not want to reinvent the wheel, I like to use existing
>  programs where I think, NUT is the perfect solution...  The problem is,
>  HOW I have to deliver the data to it or how must I provide it?
NUT currently supports two fairly generic standards, SNMP and USB
HID/PDC (in addition to a wide variety of proprietary protocols). The
DS80C411 seems to support Ethernet, so SNMP might be an option. (Don't
be fooled by how complex the host-side SNMP code is - SNMP is meant to
be easy to implement on the embedded-device side, if you are serving
up a static dataset.)

You also mentioned USB above. If you go the USB route, and design a
HID PDC (power device class) interface, it should be fairly simple to
add support to the usbhid-ups module in NUT. It might also even work
in other OSes.
>  The "PowerWhatch" module picks only the Voltage and Amperes and
>  Temperature from each of the 11 modules... and maybe it will store them
>  for a while in a 8-16 kByte NV-RAM or something like this...
One thing that we currently don't do much with in NUT is deal with
historical data - mostly because there are very few UPSes out there
that return anything other than current status. You can, of course,
log things external to NUT by querying it through the TCP client
interface, and many people have stored the data in systems such as
rrdtool or MRTG.

-- 
- Charles Lepple

Hi Michelle,

On Tue, 11 Mar 2008 16:22:09 +0100, Michelle Konzack
wrote:
> Hello Developers and *,
> 
> I am working on a "24V DC ATX PSU" for Photopholtaik Systems
which can
> have input voltages from 18V to 27.7 Volt and is entirely modular,
> which mean, you can select the desired module/s (up to 6) from ATX
> (96/144/240/300W), P4 (144W), SATA (82/305W) and Device (34/68/136W)
> 
> And last not least, I want to build a "PowerWhatch" module which
should
> be connected from the PSU to an internal USB port of the mainboard.
> 
> Currently I do not know, whether I should use Maxims 1-Wire chips like
> the DS2450 which has four AD-Converter or a I?C/SMBus solution.  Both
> will work with the DS80C411 Microcontroller...
> 
> Now the question to you:
> 
> Since I do not want to reinvent the wheel, I like to use existing
> programs where I think, NUT is the perfect solution...  The problem is,
> HOW I have to deliver the data to it or how must I provide it?
> 
> The "PowerWhatch" module picks only the Voltage and Amperes and
> Temperature from each of the 11 modules... and maybe it will store them
> for a while in a 8-16 kByte NV-RAM or something like this...
> 
> If you have ideas or suggestions, please let me know.
Given that you are working on a PSU and not a UPS, I am not sure that
nut is the best tool to interface with. Wouldn't it make more sense to
add one or more hardware monitoring chips in your PSU and connect them
to the motherboard's SMBus, and use a hardware monitoring driver in the
kernel to monitor all the values you are interested in? There are many
popular chips already supported by the Linux kernel, which can monitor
several voltages, temperatures and/or fans. And then there's a library
for applications to access the data easily.

Just my 2 cents of course, depends on what you want to do exactly.

-- 
Jean Delvare