Battery Charger UP120AC Duo USB "PC Link"

gustafson · Guru Joined: 12 Aug 2004 Posts: 430

Hi all,
I have a Ultra Power UP120AC Duo, a battery charger for RC lipo batteries etc. It has a "PC Link" usb port on the side which is meant for data logging. I can't find any software which reads this and am trying to figure out how I may do this homebrew style.

dmesg provides the following:

[ 1782.892269] usb 1-1.6: new full-speed USB device number 7 using ehci-pci
[ 1782.980161] input: SILICON LABORATORIES C8051F3xx Development Board as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1d.0/usb1/1-1/1-1.6/1-1.6:1.0/0003:0000:0001.0002/input/input26
[ 1782.980240] hid-generic 0003:0000:0001.0002: input: USB HID v1.01 Device [SILICON LABORATORIES C8051F3xx Development Board] on usb-0000:00:1d.0-1.6/input0

I'm not very knowledgable about the USB interface but assumed this might have worked to get some raw data (it didn't):
$ cat /dev/ttyS0
cat: /dev/ttyS0: Input/output error

Any ideas?
Thanks,

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Sun Jul 03, 2016 7:48 pm Post subject:

gustafson,

It should have a USB identity in lsusb. Please post that.

It may well be a serial over USB device too. If so it will need some kernel modules and you will get something like /dev/ttyUSB0 you can read from.
Making sense of what you get is another matter.

/dev/ttyS0 is a real RS232 serial port, most PCs don't have them any more.

The C8051F3 is a general purpose Silicon Labs microcontroller. We need to know now to talk to it and haw it talks to us.
It should have a unique Vendor and Device ID programmed into it with the application code its running now. Thats what lsusb will tell us.

If you want a wild guess, I would try a Uninterruptible Power Supply monitoring program. That battery charger has a lot it common with a UPS.
I guess that the vendor would not reinvent an interface for which there are already a few standards.
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

gustafson · Guru Joined: 12 Aug 2004 Posts: 430

NeddySeagoon, you've been at this a long time. Thanks for all your help over the years.

lsusb yields:

Ant P. · Watchman Joined: 18 Apr 2009 Posts: 6920

Well the USB ID's all but useless... the kernel does see it as a HID device though, maybe you can get something useful out of the hiddev/hidraw device node?

pilla · Posted: Mon Jul 04, 2016 2:47 pm Post subject:

C8051Fxxx means it is an 8-bit 8051 microcontroller, but you are connecting to it through a USB to PC-Link adapter, right?

Maybe this has some pointers: How to install the PC-Link reader on Linux (for debian/ubuntu, but packages must not be so different).
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"I'm just very selective about the reality I choose to accept." -- Calvin