APC Back-UPS 650 & NUT

Third party integrations
1

I’m trying to integrate my APC Back-UPS 650 with HA. My HA is running on a Dell Wyse 5070 thin client; When I connect the UPS to the Dell via USB, what may (but not always) show up in the device list is like /dev/bus/ups/001/009. The details of this device show all the APC device details. No other /dev entry links to the UPS. The NUT App steadfastly refuses to use this device, issuing verbose, specific, objections in the log, while trying to connect to some random Belkin device, failing and restarting, over and over and over. It seems that the problem is that the APC UPS is not fully recognized and “handled” by the OS.
Is this a known issue? Is there a fix? Am I doing something wrong?

P.S. Here’s some of the log file.
“Network UPS Tools 2.8.5 release - Generic HID driver 0.71
USB communication driver (libusb 1.0) 0.53
WARNING: warn_if_bad_usb_port_filename(): port argument specified to
the driver is “/dev/bus/usb/001/009” but USB drivers do not use it and rely on
libusb walking all devices and matching their identification metadata.
NUT documentation recommends port=“auto” for USB devices to avoid confusion.
This Belkin device (050d:0119) is not (or perhaps not yet) supported
by usbhid-ups. Please make sure you have an up-to-date version of NUT.
If this does not fix the problem, try running the driver with the
‘-x productid=0119’ option, or iterate with explicit ‘-x subdriver=…’
option. Please report your results to the NUT user’s mailing list
at [email protected].
No matching HID UPS found”

2

I asume you own a APC BK****M2, BX****MI or BVK****M2. They are know to be problematic. I own a BX950MI and there was no way to have a long living connection. From 1 hour to about 2 days the data stalls and will no longer be updated until you unplug and replug the USB-cable.

I disabled nut for this device.

3

It’s a BE650G1 but may have the same issue. I can also tell you that my Windows PC had no problems at all identifying the UPS’ USB connection. I’m running APC’s PowerChute program on my Windows PC right now and it is monitoring the UPS just fine.

It appears that the USB device gets to the “Enumeration” stage but fails at the “Driver Matching” stage. Maybe the NUT app doesn’t quite know how to deal with this model and can’t sort it all out.

4

Yes, PowerChute was fine for me, too. But I didn’t run this very long. Just to check it’s OK for APC.

5

Some weeks ago I came across this project:
https://community.home-assistant.io/t/share-standalone-wi-fi-bridge-for-usb-upss-esp32-s3-full-nut-server/

It took some days (2 :laughing:) to get the parts and today I had some spare hours to fit it together.

It works well with my problem APC. No need to select a driver. Worked out of the box. After flashing it…

The Idea is to use a switchable USB-power-supply to reset it, if it stalls. For the last couple of hours it worked fine.

Fingers crossed.