HID, an anacronym for “Human Interface Device”, usually intended for devices like your computer mouse or keyboard, but is the standard for “plug and play” devices that operate over your computer USB port. A USB HID allows the UPS to become a plug and play device without the need for installing additional software.
Our new range of VIX3000+, VIS-RT and VFI-RT+ models now have UPS HID compliance built in as standard. This means that when connected to a desktop, the operating system recognises the UPS is connected and you can set your operating system to act accordingly on UPS events. In effect, it makes your desktop behave similar to a laptop.
Plugging the USB into a Windows 10 PC, the system recognises and installs the device. In the taskbar, the UPS status icon is now present. Hovering over this gives the UPS status and now allows you to customise the power plan.
Choose a plan and click on “Change plan settings”.
Click on “Change advanced power settings”.
From here you can configure the options you want. You can set the low battery level, critical battery level and what to do on these events. In the case above we’re telling the operating system to shut down the computer in the event of UPS low battery.
Warnings
Do not choose Sleep. You might not know this but sleep puts the computer into a low power mode. It still requires power. So if / when the UPS switches off, any data on the computer will be lost. Hibernate is the best option to choose in our opinion as it will preserve the status of the PC along with all open applications.
If you need more control of the UPS, or different actions to perform, you will need to install the ViewPower software provided and disable the UPS HID.
Addendum
We’ve tested this on MAC OS/X 10.something (a MacMini) and it also works as expected.