Vero 4K + and UPS

Hi forum,

I live on an small island in south-east asia and we have allways some unexpected power cuts.
I protected my NAS with an APC UPS (uninterruptible-power-supply) to secure the device and the hard drives.

Is it possible to connect a Vero 4K + to a seperate UPS and can the Vero 4K + beeing powered down by the UPS via USB connection?

I know that this a a special question, but I think it would not be healthy for the Vero 4K + when it is shut down by power cuts, or?

Thank and best regards

Chang

There appears to be a daemon available to monitor APC UPSs. It’s called apcupsd and can be installed from the Vero command line:

sudo apt install apcupsd

I have no experience using it. They do have a web site: http://www.apcupsd.org/ that looks to have some useful information about it.

You might want to test your vero with the UPS you have now to make sure that it will actually work before buying one and trying to get software to work. Most UPS that consumer use are of the standby (offline) variety which means they only run off the battery when the power goes off. The problem with this is there is a very brief period of time when the power gets cut off. Some devices cannot handle this. An additional issue is that the A/C sign wave they put out when running on battery power is not always clean enough to make some devices happy.

I don’t know if there would be issues with the Vero, but I have plugged several different Raspberry Pi’s into several different APC UPS’s and some worked and some locked up whenever the UPS switched.

There is also a package named nut (Network UPS Tools).

I have used it with great success on a variety of UPS hardware. It even allows connecting multiple devices to the same UPS and use the monitoring USB/serial connection on one device to automatically shutdown the other devices if they are also running nut.

1 Like

Thank you all for jumping on this thread and sharing your knowledge.

I will have a close look on the proposed software. On the other side it is a considerable question if a 100$ device needs to be protected with an investment nearly double the value of the Vero 4K +.

I will test and try out when I am home end of next month.

Maybe the Vero 4k + is not so sensitive when it comes to power cuts. The Raspberry’s I used survived all power cuts so far.

Well, you can connect your AVR, TV, any drives etc. to the UPS, so it’s probably worth the money.

Plug it into the same UPS as another device. The Vero uses so little power that it won’t cut the run time of other devices enough to matter. I have my Vero 4K, a network switch, my DirecTV DVR, and another low-power media player all plugged into the same UPS. It will run a couple of hours with no problem.

There are actually a few different ‘protected’ questions here. A UPS would possibly help with any software corruption concerns if you were able to safely shutdown. If you are only using it as a media player you would be unlikely to have any issues with that though. A UPS could also help if you have brownouts but I would think that would generally slowly break the power adapter and replacing that is a lot less than a UPS. As you already have one UPS the logs in that should tell you if you have problems with that. The final question would be of power surges that can be common before or after a blackout. These are probably what you would need to be most concerned with. Luckily all you really need to protect yourself from that is a half decent power strip with MOV’s inside it. A web search should give you plenty of information on that.

Again, thank you very much for your input. I will try out the different senarious when I am back home.
Currently I enjoy a nice holiday.

Best regards

Chang

apcupsd was the solution. It works like a charm.

Thank you all for your input.

1 Like