Last month, in a blog post, open source developer, Eric Raymond wrote that UPS is a painful product category. He suggested that this whole product category needs to be disrupted by an open-hardware design that will address the many deficiencies of existing hardware.
As, the Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) market was overdue for open source disruption, Eric opens up the work-in-progress on GitLab: the Upside project. The Upside Project is currently defining requirements and developing a specification for a “high quality UPS that can be built from off-the-shelf parts in any reasonably well-equipped makerspace or home electronics shop,” he added.
In the original post “UPSes suck and need to be disrupted”, Eric mentioned a set of complaints about what’s sold to consumer/SOHO users.
UPSs lack the kind of sensor information that protected car batteries. Raymond wrote he wants the UPS to provide text-based alarm messages (rather than flashing lamps), and to provide decent monitoring information over USB. All this sounded interesting and many joined the project.
Eric in the latest blog informs that, Eric Baskin is the leading hardware engineering for Upside, Jay Maynard is the developing firmware, and Jeremy Mitts is copy-editing the documents. He also further informed, their final deliverable will be PCB designs, a full parts list, assembly instructions, and full manuals for the hardware and software.
The Upside Project, is working towards UPS with Smart charging to preserve the battery. Instead of lead-acid, LiFePO (lithium iron phosphate) Batteries are suggested. The open source UPS should be able to deliver 300W for 15 minutes.
