Below are pictures of the Hack on a OR500L ups (other models may be slightly different).Must be low cost, 300w, rack mounted, have batteries that load into the front and have a serial port.
Cyberpower Ups Serial Pinout Rs232 Plus Cost WasOf course APC and Tripp-lite were on top of the list but now they only have USB or dumb ports for connection plus cost was prohibitive. Now CyberPower comes into the picture, it fit all my requirements AND had a neat display to add to the WOW factor (more on the display later). Thinking I had found the perfect solution I ordered one and with great disappointment found it had a serial port that does NOT support serial data CyberPower marketing their product as having a serial port was plain not accurate. In fact pins 2 3 (the data pins) of the port are not connected to anything The only functions available from that port are onoff hardwired signals for Load on battery and Load on line, it had one input to shut down the unit, not very functional at all. It did have a USB pot which DOES support data transfer but there is no published protocol and home-brew interfacing to USB is a major job which is why I ruled out the other UPSs. However there was a port for a plug in optional network card which also could provide useful data but at a cost as much as the UPS which was not a cost efficient solution. Cyberpower Ups Serial Pinout Rs232 Driver For AndUSB as mentioned earlier is very tricky and time consuming to make a driver for and would require a 3rd party microprocessor to convert it to serial so that is ruled out. The actual serial port is useless so that left only the network option port. After some sniffing I easily found it communicated at 2400 baud and used plain English commands (mostly single keystrokes, wow) If anyone has done interfacing to APC serial ports you will notice much similarity. Cyberpower Ups Serial Pinout Rs232 Drivers And GetI also found that since the rxtx signals were positive polarity I could just wire them to a standard computer serial port without any drivers and get error free data communication (again WOW). I needed to order a large quantity of boards to make them cost efficient so I have extras. I decided for situations where there needs to be a long run of cable or if your just too geeky to get over putting TTL into a RS232 port I put a driver circuit on the board that can be optionally added. By adding a MAX2232 some caps, 5v lp reg and cutting 2 traces makes it a fully compliant RS232 interface. Any CyberPower UPS that will accept a RMCARD202 or RMCARD205 network card should work. Want to roll your own Read on for all the info you will need. The UPS will NOT push any data, you must poll the UPS (every 3 seconds works nicely) using the D command to receive the data. Next you must parse the received data watching for the identifiers which are again plain English I,O,L,B,F,R,S the last 5 bytes of data are the onoff flags that provide onoff onlineoffline, etc status. Most of the bits stay static, the only meat I found was in the first two bytes and is detailed below. If anyone finds more information please email and I will update the page. I did not need any of this info for my project so this is not a complete reference, again if anyone can add to this you are welcome to email me your results and I will update this page as needed. After much contemplation I came up with a Hardware hack where by adding one wire internal to the UPS and a 10k resistor on my board I could pulse the RTS pin of the serial interface and simulate a push of the front panel button thereby bringing on the display and changing modes to add action to the readout.
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