LabVIEW communication with a SmartUPS

[rolfk]

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@billko wrote:

I thought all modern UPS's are capable of SNMP?  I would go with serial port monitoring though because it will be a simple physical connection and if the connection is lost, you know you have problems.  Edit: I forgot most modern UPS's no longer have serial ports.

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Neither do they have always ethernet ports, except the higher level professional ones. And while it would be possible to have a virtual network adapter over USB, I kind of doubt they implement that for the units not having a physical network port. So SNMP is definitely not a universal way of interfacing to USPs.

[JHall92]

APC SmartUPS support networking and serial communications, but does not support the serial protocols the simple programmer wants (I use term simple because for me serial write/read to a device is easiest).

When unpackaging an APC SmartUPS, the UPS comes with a tiny card that instructs to install PowerChute. The rest of the documentation from APC and tech support, in my opinion, was not very good. I found it much quicker to just monitor the size of the event log file that the APC writes to when connected via USB. I do this every minute. When the size changes, get the latest event from the log file.

For my application, we are just looking for the SmartUPS event that occurs when power line failure occurs and the UPS is running on battery backup. We do this so we can return equipment to safe modes and safely shutdown all equipment in our program before backup power is lost.

For anyone who uses this method, after PowerChute installation, the log file was found here

C:\Program Files (x86)\APC\PowerChute Business Edition\agent\log\pcbe.log

Best regards,

Jeremy

[DavidBoyd]

Jeremy,

Just wondering if you had found and scrolled through this ancient thread, and if not I hope you may find it of some use.  @PhillipBrooks and I both tackled LabVIEW support for UPS querying (trying to be manufacturer-agnostic, though the APC SmartUPS series was the archetype).

Best regards,

Dave

[billko]

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@rolfk wrote:

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@billko wrote:

I thought all modern UPS's are capable of SNMP?  I would go with serial port monitoring though because it will be a simple physical connection and if the connection is lost, you know you have problems.  Edit: I forgot most modern UPS's no longer have serial ports.

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Neither do they have always ethernet ports, except the higher level professional ones. And while it would be possible to have a virtual network adapter over USB, I kind of doubt they implement that for the units not having a physical network port. So SNMP is definitely not a universal way of interfacing to USPs.

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(Disclaimer: This is meant as humor and not as a slight on your remark.)

So are we supposed to communicate with smoke signals?

[rolfk]

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@billko wrote:

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@rolfk wrote:

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@billko wrote:

I thought all modern UPS's are capable of SNMP?  I would go with serial port monitoring though because it will be a simple physical connection and if the connection is lost, you know you have problems.  Edit: I forgot most modern UPS's no longer have serial ports.

---

Neither do they have always ethernet ports, except the higher level professional ones. And while it would be possible to have a virtual network adapter over USB, I kind of doubt they implement that for the units not having a physical network port. So SNMP is definitely not a universal way of interfacing to USPs.

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(Disclaimer: This is meant as humor and not as a slight on your remark.)

So are we supposed to communicate with smoke signals?

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It's the most universal communication standard worldwide! 😂 What worked for our ancestors several 1000 years ago should be good enough for us too, shouldn't it! I doubt anybody will even remember USB over 100 years. Likely not even Ethernet, but who knows.