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Monitor CyberPower UPS wattage

··603 words·3 mins·
Fedora Linux Shell Ups
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I have a CyberPower CP1350AVRLCD under my desk at home and I use it to run my computer, monitors, speakers, and a lamp. My new computer is a little more power hungry than my old one since I just moved to to a Ryzen 3700x and Nvidia GeForce 2060 and I like to keep tabs on how much energy it is consuming.

Some power supplies offer a monitoring interface where you can watch your power consumption in real time, but I’m not willing to spend that much money. Most CyberPower UPS units offer some pretty decent power monitoring features right out of the box, and fortunately for us, they work quite well in Linux.

In this post, we will set up the Linux communication with the UPS and make it easy to monitor via scripts. Also, we will add it to an existing polybar configuration so we can monitor it right from the desktop environment.

Installing powerpanel #

CyberPower offers software called PowerPanel that runs on most Linux distributions. It has a daemon (pwrstatd) and a client (pwrstat) that allows you to monitor the UPS and take actions automatically when the power is disrupted.

Download the PowerPanel RPM and install it:

sudo dnf install ~/Downloads/powerpanel-132-0x86_64.rpm

As I noted in my post called Troubleshooting CyberPower PowerPanel issues in Linux, we need to tell pwrstatd where it should communicate with the UPS. If you skip this step, the daemon hangs without much explanation of what is happening.

Open /etc/pwrstatd.conf with your favorite text editor and change the allowed_device_nodes line to point to the right USB device:

# For example: restrict to use libusb device.
# allowed-device-nodes = libusb
allowed-device-nodes = /dev/usb/hiddev0

Unfortunately, CyberPower doesn’t ship a systemd unit file for pwrstatd. Write this unit file to /etc/systemd/system/pwrstatd.service:

[Unit]
Description=pwrstatd

[Service]
Group=wheel
UMask=0002
ExecStart=/usr/sbin/pwrstatd

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

The wheel group should be fine here if your user is already in that group and uses sudo. You can also change that to a different group, like power, and then add your user to the power group.

Now we can reload systemd, start pwrstatd, and ensure it comes up at boot time:

systemctl daemon-reload
systemctl enable --now pwrstatd

Testing the client #

The pwrstat client is installed in /usr/sbin by default, but since this is my home computer and I trust what happens there, I want to be able to run this command as my regular user. Move the client to /usr/bin instead:

mv /usr/sbin/pwrstat /usr/bin/pwrstat

Let’s try getting a current status:

$ pwrstat -status
The UPS information shows as following:

  Properties:
    Model Name...................  CP 1350C
    Firmware Number.............. BFE5107.B23
    Rating Voltage............... 120 V
    Rating Power................. 810 Watt

  Current UPS status:
    State........................ Normal
    Power Supply by.............. Utility Power
    Utility Voltage.............. 124 V
    Output Voltage............... 124 V
    Battery Capacity............. 100 %
    Remaining Runtime............ 38 min.
    Load......................... 137 Watt(17 %)
    Line Interaction............. None
    Test Result.................. Unknown
    Last Power Event............. None

Just the wattage, please #

Awesome! Let’s make a really short script that will dump just the wattage for us:

#!/bin/bash
pwrstat -status | grep -oP "Load\.* \K([0-9]+)(?= Watt)"

Now we can test the script:

$ ~/bin/ups_wattage.sh
137

My computer (and accessories) are using 137 watts.

Adding it to polybar #

I use polybar as my status bar, and it’s easy to add a custom command to the bar. Here’s my configuration section for my ups_wattage.sh script:

[module/wattage]
    type = custom/script
    exec = ~/bin/ups_wattage.sh
    label = " %output%W"
    interval = 15
    format-padding = 1

Add that to your bar (mine is on the right side):

[bar/primary]
    ---SNIP---
    modules-right = weather cpu memory gpu filesystem wattage uptime
    ---SNIP---

There’s live power monitoring right there in my polybar!

polybar wattage

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