WTI remote power strip

I have a Western Telematics, Inc RPB+ remote power strip. I picked it up on eBay.

Currently I control it from Bellman to remotely power up Dart, which is set to "power up after power failure" in BIOS. That means I can use "sudo poweroff" to cleanly shutdown and then use the powerstrip's BOOT command to power cycle it when I want to bring it back online. Since this server is big, and I don't use it all the time, this makes my power bill lower.

On the outside:

• 5 switched AC outlets, individually controllable
• Can switch up to 15A on one port, up to 15A for all ports.
• 9 pin RS232 port (you need a null modem cable to connect)
• Dip switch for setting baud rate
• An LED for each outlet on the front panel

Inside it has:

• a PIC 16C56 microcontroller, in a socket
• 5 nice relays and associated drivers to interface to PIC
• a 555 timer
• an ADM232 on the serial port
• a power supply

A PIC 16C56 has:

• 18 pin DIP
• 1.5K memory
• 25 bytes of RAM (whew! takes my breath away!)
• 1 8-bit timer
• It's OTP = one time programmable

To substitute a flash device I could drop in a 16F628A, then I'd get 3.5k of RAM and 224 bytes of RAM.

Operation

Manual File:Wti power strip.pdf

There are DIP switches to set serial port rate. I keep it at 9600.

From bellman,

minicom --device /dev/ttyS0

The prompt is RPB+>

The menu should come up. If it does not try typing "/S", that gives you status.

1. Dart

The basic command is "/n ON | OFF | BOOT", where "n" is a port number 1-5.

BOOT powers down, pauses, then powers up.