Eric S Raymond Taking To Working On An Open Hardware / Open-Source UPS

Controversial open-source figure Eric S. Raymond is hoping to begin work on an open-source, open hardware design for an uninterruptible power supply (UPS).

ESR is very unhappy with the state of UPS power supplies and he is hoping for an open-source, easily buildable design could change the landscape. At the moment the focus is on just pushing out the PCB schematics and design for such a unit with users left to build the UPS yourself, but he has said he wouldn't mind if some startup or other company ends up making use of these open-source plans to bring a better UPS to market.

This comes a month after Eric's rant about uninterruptible power supplies with how he's unhappy with the products due to their poor batteries, inadequate notifications, and all around leaving a lot to be desired with not much progress being made over the years.

He's hoping for this open-source UPS design to support deep-cycle margine gel batteries that would last much longer than conventional UPS batteries, use an EV-style intelligent battery-current sensors, has a textual alert status display and alarms, support USB monitoring with a fully-documented wire protocol, and be a open hardware design with open-source firmware.

ESR is organizing this new open hardware project as UPSide on GitLab. Obviously having just launched the project, it's still in its very early design stages and at this point is mostly a Wiki as he looks for help on the hardware design phase.