Bash script to read USB UPS status

Question

I have an UPS attached via USB port to my linux machine. Unfortunately the UPS is unsupported and doesn't show up as a reconized device. However it DOES show up correctly with the lsusb command.

I'd like to read the battery status from my UPS via a simple bash script (triggered by cron for example). I don't want a fully functional script as it would require to know the protocol of the specific UPS; I just want to create a script to write raw commands and read raw responses to/from the UPS given the known USB address, then it will be up to me to encode the actual command and parse the response.

Thank you.

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Mar 04 '13 at 14:12

2

You might be able to use the normal echo command to send strings directly to a device, like:

echo "some command" > /dev/usbXXX

To get the output you might be able to just read from it using e.g. cat:

cat /dev/usbXXX | grep "what you're looking for"

answered Mar 04 '13 at 14:12

Some programmer dude

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ok, do you know if there is some standard for UPS communication or only custom protocols? – Gianluca Ghettini Mar 04 '13 at 14:41
@G_G I doubt there is any standard between vendors, but maybe there is some standard between models from the same vendor. – Some programmer dude Mar 04 '13 at 14:43
ok, I'll try cat-ing the device and see what it spits out, if I'm lucky I'll get ASCII data coming out but I really doubt it... :) I feel it's a sort of command/response binary protocol – Gianluca Ghettini Mar 04 '13 at 15:51

Bash script to read USB UPS status

1 Answers1