TRIPPLITE_USB(8)

📦
version 2.8.5 · 18 versions
, in fedora 43, fedora 44

💖 TRIPPLITE_USB 💖

okay bestie, sit down, we're talking about tripplite_usb — that's section 8 of the NUT Manual, and it's literally the driver for older Tripp Lite USB UPSes (not PDC HID). yes, "not PDC HID" is doing a lot of work in that sentence and yes, we will get into it. 🦋

✨ NAME ✨

tripplite_usb — Driver for older Tripp Lite USB UPSes (not PDC HID)

no cap, that's the whole vibe. it's a driver. it talks to old Tripp Lite UPSes over USB. it is not the PDC HID one, and if you mix those two up you're gonna have a bad time. 💅

🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

tripplite_usb -h

tripplite_usb -a UPS_NAME [OPTIONS]

that's it. -h for help (iconic, always there for you), or -a with a UPS name plus whatever options your heart desires. 🫶

👑 SUPPORTED HARDWARE 👑

so here's the tea: this driver is for older Tripp Lite UPSes that get detected as USB HID-class devices but are not true HID Power-Device Class devices. like, they're pretending. they're cosplaying HID. 🎭

so far, the devices tripplite_usb supports have product ID 0001. the newer units — the ones with "LCD" in the model name — have product ID 2001, and those need usbhid-ups(8) instead. not this driver. different driver. don't @ me.

💌 please report success or failure to the nut-upsuser mailing list! a key piece of information is the protocol number, which gets returned in ups.firmware.aux. also, be sure to turn on debugging (-DDD) so the log messages are actually informative instead of cryptic.

if your Tripp Lite UPS uses a serial port, you might wanna go check out the tripplite(8) or tripplitesu(8) drivers instead. this one is a USB situation. 🔌

this driver has been tested with the following models:

  • INTERNETOFFICE700
  • OMNIVS1000
  • OMNIVS1500XL (some warnings, she's a little dramatic)
  • SMART700USB
  • SMART1500RM2U
  • SMART2200RMXL2U
  • SMART3000RM2U

and if you've used Tripp Lite's PowerAlert software to connect to your UPS, there's a good chance tripplite_usb will work — if it uses one of these protocols:

  • Protocol 0004
  • Protocol 1001
  • Protocol 2001
  • Protocol 3003
  • Protocol 3005

on the other hand 🙈 — if the web page for your UPS on the Tripp-Lite website says "HID-compliant USB port also enables direct integration with built-in power management and auto-shutdown features of Windows and MAC OS X" — then nope, bestie, you want the usbhid-ups(8) driver instead. different girl entirely.

🎀 EXTRA ARGUMENTS 🎀

this driver supports the following optional settings in the ups.conf(5) file, or you can pass them with -x on the command line. yes, -x. we love a flag. ⭐

  • port = string — Required option for all NUT drivers. some value must be set, and typically that value is auto for drivers that handle USB connections.
📝 Note — this could be a device filesystem path like /dev/usb/hiddev0, but the current use of the libusb API precludes knowing and matching by such identifiers. they may also be inherently unreliable (dependent on re-plugging and enumeration order). at this time the actual value is ignored, but syntactically some port configuration must still be there. so like… fill it in anyway. it's a formality. 💀

it is possible to control multiple UPS units simultaneously by running several instances of this driver — provided they can be uniquely distinguished by setting some combination of the vendor, product, vendorid, productid, serial, bus and/or device options detailed below. for devices or operating systems that don't provide sufficient information, the allow_duplicates option can be of use (limited and risky!). ⚠️

  • vendorid = regex, productid = regex, vendor = regex, product = regex, serial = regex — select a specific UPS, in case there's more than one connected via USB. each option specifies an extended regular expression (see regex(7) for more on regular expressions), which must match the UPS's entire respective vendor/product/serial string values (minus any surrounding whitespace), or the whole 4-digit hexadecimal code for vendorid and productid.

try lsusb(8), or run this NUT driver with the -DD command-line argument, for finding out the strings to match. 🔍

examples:

  • -x vendor="Foo.Corporation.*"
  • -x vendorid="051d*" (APC)
  • -x product=".*(Smart|Back)-?UPS.*"
  • bus = regex — OPTIONAL, NOT RECOMMENDED.

select a UPS on a specific USB bus or group of buses. the argument is a regular expression that must match the bus name where the UPS is connected (e.g. bus="002" or bus="00[2-3]") as seen on Linux in /sys/bus/usb/devices or lsusb(8); including leading zeroes. 👀

📝 Note — bus numbers are not guaranteed by the OS to be stable across re-boots, kernel driver reloads or device re-plugging (e.g. changing visible population of USB hubs). she moves. she changes. do not trust her.
  • device = regex — OPTIONAL, NOT RECOMMENDED.

select a UPS on a specific USB device or group of devices. the argument is a regular expression that must match the device name where the UPS is connected (e.g. device="001" or device="00[1-2]") as seen on Linux in /sys/bus/usb/devices or lsusb(8); including leading zeroes. 🫠

📝 Note — device numbers are not guaranteed by the OS to be stable across re-boots or device re-plugging. same energy as above. chaos.
  • busport = regex — OPTIONAL, NOT RECOMMENDED.

if supported by the hardware, OS and libusb on the particular deployment, this option should allow you to specify physical port numbers on a USB hub, rather than logical device enumeration values — and in turn, this should be less volatile across reboots or re-plugging. the value may be seen in the USB topology output of lsusb -tv on systems with that tool, for example. 🌈

📝 Note — this option is not practically supported by some NUT builds (it should be ignored with a warning then), and not by all systems that NUT can run on. iykyk.
  • allow_duplicates — OPTIONAL, NOT RECOMMENDED.

if you have several UPS devices which may not be uniquely identified by the options above (e.g. only VID:PID can be discovered there), this flag allows each driver instance where it's set to take the first match if available, or proceed to try another.

normally the driver initialization would abort at this point claiming "Resource busy" or a similar error, assuming that the otherwise properly matched device is unique — and some other process already handles it.

🚨 Warning — this feature is inherently non-deterministic! the association of driver instance name to actual device may vary between runs! if you only care to know that at least one of your no-name UPSes is online, this option can help. if you must really know which one, it will not! 💀
  • usb_set_altinterface = bAlternateSetting — force a redundant call to usb_set_altinterface(), especially if needed for devices serving multiple USB roles where the UPS is not represented by the interface number 0 (which is the default).
  • usb_config_index, usb_hid_rep_index, usb_hid_desc_index, usb_hid_ep_in, usb_hid_ep_out — force use of specific interface, endpoint, descriptor index etc. numbers, rather than defaulting to 0 (rarely other values in certain drivers for some devices known to use non-zero numbers). specified as a hexadecimal number. 🔢

as a rule of thumb for usb_hid_desc_index discovery, you can see larger wDescriptorLength values (roughly 600+ bytes) in reports of lsusb or similar tools.

  • LIBUSB_DEBUG = INTEGER — run-time troubleshooting of USB-capable NUT drivers can involve not only raising the common NUT debug verbosity (e.g. using the DEBUG_MIN setting in ups.conf(5) or protocol commands to change the driver.debug value), but may also benefit from LibUSB specific debugging. 🔬

for the latter, you can set the LIBUSB_DEBUG driver option; alternatively you can classically export the environment variable LIBUSB_DEBUG before starting a NUT driver program (may be set and "exported" in driver init script or service method, perhaps via nut.conf(5)), to a numeric value such as 4 ("All messages are emitted").

for more details, including the currently supported values for your version of the library, see e.g.:

  • -x upsid="12345" — select a specific UPS by its unique UPS ID. the argument is a regular expression that must match the UPS ID string. this allows for precise identification of UPS devices when multiple devices of the same make and model are connected. see below regarding how to read and write the ups id (unit id) using upsrw(8). 🏷️

Notes for tripplite_usb driver handling of common USB matching settings:

  • product is a regular expression to match the product string for the UPS. this would be useful if you have two different Tripp Lite UPS models connected to the same monitoring system, and you want to be sure that you shut them down in the correct order. ✨

this regex is matched against the full USB product string as seen in lsusb(8). the ups.model in the upsc(8) output only lists the name after TRIPP LITE, so to match a SMART2200RMXL2U, you could use the regex like .*SMART2200.*.

  • the productid is a regular expression which matches the UPS PID as four hexadecimal digits. so far, the only known devices that work with this driver have PID 0001.
  • the serial option may be or may not be helpful: it does not appear that these particular Tripp Lite UPSes supported by this driver use the iSerial descriptor field to return a serial number. however, in case your unit does, you may specify it here. 🙃
  • offdelay — this setting controls the delay between receiving the "kill" command (-k) and actually cutting power to the computer. 💀 power = gone. eventually.
  • battery_min, battery_max — these floating-point values correspond to the "empty" (10%) and "full" (100%) voltages of the battery. they're used for an approximation of the battery state-of-charge. the calculated battery.charge value will be clamped to the range of 10% through 100%, so the resting voltage of the charged battery can be used for battery_max, and the higher float charge voltage should not cause problems. 🍓

🦋 RUNTIME VARIABLES 🦋

  • ups.delay.shutdown — this variable is the same as the offdelay setting, but it can be changed at runtime by upsrw(8). glow-up in real time. ✨
  • ups.id — some SMARTPRO models feature a Unit ID (ups.id) that can be set and retrieved. if your UPS supports this feature, this variable will be listed in the output of upsrw(8). 💖
  • outlet.1.switch — some Tripp Lite units have a switchable outlet (usually outlet #1) which can be turned on and off by writing 1 or 0, respectively, to outlet.1.switch with upsrw(8). 🎛️

if your unit has multiple switchable outlets, substitute the outlet number for 1 in the variable name. be sure to test this first — there is no other way to be certain that the number used by the driver matches the label on the unit. seriously. test it. 👑

💀 KNOWN ISSUES AND BUGS 💀

Okay bestie, real talk time. This driver was not built off any official docs from Tripp Lite — nobody handed over the secret lore, so it's kinda going off vibes and reverse-engineering. Which means certain events may totally confuse the driver. 😭 If you see anything acting weird, just re-run the driver with -DDD to crank the verbosity up, and you'll get way more to go on.

So here's the tea: as far as anyone can tell, the Tripp Lite UPSes don't have a serial number or any other globally unique identifier you can reach through USB. Nope, nothing. So if you're monitoring several Tripp Lite USB UPSes at once, you gotta use the bus, device, or product configuration options to say, unambiguously, which UPS a given driver instance is supposed to be controlling. No guessing, no vibes-based routing. 💅

Like, example: you can easily monitor an OMNIVS1000 and a SMART1500RM2U at the same time, because they have different USB Product ID strings. Different strings, no problemo. 🎀 But if you've got two SMART1500RM2U units? Then you'd have to figure out which USB bus and device number each unit is on (via lsusb(8)). Slight detective work, but you got this.

✨ And some of the SMART*2U models have a configurable Unit ID number, and you can now use the upsid config argument to uniquely specify which UPS a given driver instance should control. That means precise identification of UPS devices when multiple devices are connected — no more "wait, which one is which" 😤. To retrieve or set the upsid, you can use the upsrw(8) utility. Slay.

👑 AUTHORS 👑

Written by Charles Lepple, based on the tripplite(8) driver by Rickard E. (Rik) Faith and Nicholas Kain.

Please do not email the authors directly — use the nut-upsdev mailing list. They're lovely, they're just busy, respect the boundary bestie 🫶

And a huge shoutout: a Tripp Lite OMNIVS1000 was graciously donated to the NUT project by Bradley Feldman (http://www.bradleyloritheo.com). Iconic behavior, truly. 💖

🔍 SEE ALSO 🔍

🧠 The core driver:

🔌 Other drivers for Tripp-Lite hardware:

🛠️ Other tools:

🌈 Internet resources:

And that's the whole page, bestie! This was Network UPS Tools version 2.8.5, dated 10/07/2026, and you just read TRIPPLITE_USB(8). Go forth and monitor your UPSes with main character energy. ⭐🔋💜

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