This Time Self-Hosted
dark mode light mode Search

apcupsd protocol

Today, I started getting annoyed by the continue wall output of apcupsd while the electric saw was being used. Unfortunately, the power cabling in my house makes the voltage go up and down when something that has big power consumption is started, so all my PTYs were full of apcupsd’s warnings about “power faults” and returns. The same goes for my mail inbox.

So I disabled WALL warnings and started thinking about writing a KDE client o apcupsd. It shouldn’t be difficult, no? I just need to write an user interface to show the data produced by apcupsd.

The only problem is that it does not provide any kind of library to access those data, there’s a TCP protocol but it’s not documented, the various utilities used by apcupsd uses an internal library to communicate with the daemon, and so there’s no way to actually write anything without reverse engineering the protocol.

Okay, I think I have an interesting work in front of me 🙂

Comments 1
  1. Try moving to using NUT instead of apcupsd.The fact that the power does that indicates that a large inductive (motors) or capacitive load is affecting the power phase (inductive load delays the phase cycle, capacitive advances), and this effectly produces power that isn’t the correct speed (usually by 5-10% in a small circuit, so 45Hz instead of 50Hz).Since you have an APC UPS, I’d recommend just turning down the sensativity – I’ve had to do that to avoid the crazy warnings from when I hit generator power (at some of my work locations we have APC SmartUPS 700 units just so that we have power for the 2-3 minutes that the generators take to start up on a power outage).

Leave a Reply to Robin JohnsonCancel reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.