I’ve written a couple of times about Eric Raymond’s (esr) project to
design and build an open source UPS power supply. Esr has posted an
update on the project.
The TL;DR is that they now have all the necessary engineers on board
and have a working design. The design is, of course, subject to
revision and not everything has been finalized but things are pretty
much specified, even down to the component level. They even have had
some interest from UPS vendor representatives.
I really hope this project succeeds. Those of us who really need a UPS
know what a pain they are. It would be nice to have a reliable system
that has an interface to the target computer that is easy to program
for. In my case, I’m mostly interested in powering down systems if the
power doesn’t come back in a minute or two. One of the goals of the
UPSide project is to provide such an interface.