energizerups - Driver for Energizer (Megatec protocol over "USB To RS232 Interface (V1.0) BaudRate 2400bps") UPS equipment

This man page only documents the hardwarespecific features of the energizerups driver. For information about the core driver, see nutupsdrv(8).

energizerups supports Energizer models such as the ERHMOF600 and EROF800.

At the time of this writing, the driver was tested only with these two models. Other Energizer models that use the same USB interface should also work, but they have not been tested for compatibility.

This driver is Linuxspecific. It is not designed to work on other operating systems.

In order for this driver to work, USB and HID support must be present on your system. As a minimum, this means that the following kernel drivers must be loaded:

hid

usbuhci

usbcore

In place of usbuhci, you may have another host controller module loaded, as appropriate for your hardware.

In version 2.4.21 and possibly other versions of the Linux kernel, the hiddev driver refuses to take control of HID devices that are also recognized as input peripherals. Unfortunately, this also applies to these Energizer UPS models. One solution to this problem is to compile a kernel with the CONFIG_HID_USBINPUT option turned off. An alternative is to modify the kernel with a simple patch. In drivers/usb/hiddev.c, in the function hiddev_connect(), the line

if (!IS_INPUT_APPLICATION(hid>application[i]))

must be removed or commented out, and the driver and/or the kernel must be recompiled.

energizerups also requires that device nodes for the UPS HID device be created. If these don't exist on your system, you can create them using the following commands:

mkdir /dev/usb

mkdir /dev/usb/hid

mknod /dev/usb/hid/hiddev0 c 180 96

mknod /dev/usb/hid/hiddev1 c 180 97

mknod /dev/usb/hid/hiddev2 c 180 98

mknod /dev/usb/hid/hiddev3 c 180 99

If your system uses the devfs file system, the appropriate node may be created automatically by the system when the UPS is connected.

You can verify that the UPS is connected and recognized by your system by mounting the usbfs file system (if it is not mounted already) and then listing all USB devices:

mount none /proc/bus/usb -t usbfs

cat /proc/bus/usb/devices

In this file, the following line should be seen:

This line indicates the presence of the USBtoserial converter that is used by these Energizer UPS models.

This driver does not support any extra settings in the ups.conf(5).

The battery percentage is derived from the voltage data that the UPS returns, since the UPS doesn't return that value directly. On some hardware, the charge will remain at 100% for a long time and then drops quickly shortly before the battery runs out. You can confirm from the battery.voltage readings that this is a problem with the UPS and not this driver.

Voltage/charge characteristics are derived from a manual calibration with an ERHMOF600. Due to hardware differences, the charge percentage reports may be very inaccurate.

Dead/broken batteries can't be reported reliably. If your UPS kills the load instantly or within seconds of starting the inverter, your batteries probably need to be replaced.

Viktor Toth (http://www.vttoth.com/)

The core driver:

Internet resources: