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The new packs finally arrived yesterday (from an outfit called Planet Battery, who has much better prices than APC or Batteries.com does on these things, and [unlike some discount houses] sells the packs assembled and ready to install). By that time, I'd already designed and built three kinds of monitoring widgets. The first kind, for the two boxes that are actually monitoring their UPSs (because they're up 24/7) inserts between the monitoring cable and the computer, with a second cable going to a "wall wart" plugged into an UNPROTECTED outlet, and has a relay that's continuously powered by the wall wart, which blocks the signal on pin 7 unless there's an actual power failure. This prevents failed self-tests from causing false alarms that do "disaster" powerdowns when there's no power failure. The second kind is much simpler, with no "input" socket, to allow our V4R2 development box to respond to power failures. It has pins 5 and 8 wired together (simply telling the compuer that a UPS is present; I don't know if this actually makes any difference), and pins 5 and 9 connected to a relay (powered by the same "wall wart" as the first kind) that ties them together if the power fails. The third kind is exactly like the second kind, except that it has a DB15 instead of a DB9, wired for our V2R3 development box (whose internal back-up battery died around 5 years ago, and was never replaced), with pins 11 and 2 tied together to indicate the presence of a UPS, and pins 11 and 9 connected to the relay, to warn of power failures. Since these two boxes aren't on 24/7, are no longer used for production, and can do normal shutdowns in less than two minutes, there's no need for them to know about low battery conditions, and it saves us the cost of installing extra monitoring ports on our UPSs. All four widgets are powered by a common "wall wart"; in all likelyhood, there's enough capacity on it to handle at least another half-dozen relays. If anybody's interested (and can't duplicate my widgets just from my descriptions), I can supply schematics. In running tests, I also discovered that the self-test doesn't consistently raise the "on battery" signal. It only seems to do so when there's a possibility of failing the test, and raising both the "on battery" and "low battery" signals at the same time. Go figure. Oh, and since nobody around here could remember which UPS got new packs when (even though we now have three pairs of packs waiting for me to see if anything's still good enough to keep around as a spare), this time I took the time to date-stamp the new packs just before I put them in. Ain't 20-20 hindsight wonderful? -- JHHL
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