[PLUG] fluke IR189USB support?

Russell Senior russell at personaltelco.net
Sat Sep 2 07:11:03 UTC 2006


>>>>> "Russell" == Russell Senior <seniorr at aracnet.com> writes:

Russell> I am looking at capturing data from one of these nice Fluke
Russell> 189 Digital Multimeters.  This particular one has an infrared
Russell> interface and an optional cable to connect to a USB port so
Russell> that you can interrogate the device for its current reading
Russell> (our data collection protocol currently has us entering an
Russell> unstable value by hand, which is proving to be quite
Russell> tedious).

Russell> Does anyone have experience with this cable, and do you know
Russell> if it works with recent linux kernels.  It is probably some
Russell> kind of usb-serial device inside, but I haven't had my hands
Russell> on one yet (got one on order).  I've found the protocol for
Russell> querying the device, so it really just boils down to the
Russell> details of being able to talk across the link.

Just a follow up on this.  Today I finally got the IR189USB cable and
a Fluke 189 together in the same building.  And then, in the last
hour, I got them together in the same room, and lo and behold: it
works!

I had discovered a month or two ago that the IR189USB was likely to
work.  I plugged it into a USB port and it got detected as a pl2303,
which is a well-supported USB/serial converter chip.  I found some
documentation from Fluke on the communication protocol here:

  <http://cfa-www.harvard.edu/~thunter/manuals/RemoteSpec89_18X.htm>

and when I type QM into a suitably configured minicom terminal, I get
a reading back out.  Pretty coolsville.

As usual, I discovered some under-reported things in the process.  The
IR link is not some TV-remote like thing, that can beam data across
the room as I had expected.  I wondered how multiple DMMs would be
discriminated in such an environment.  Instead, the Fluke 189 has a
little jig that holds the IR part of the cable directly against the
top of the meter, meaning one-cable/one-fluke189.

But, once I got gpsd to let go of /dev/ttyUSB0 (thank you mr.
/usr/bin/lsof), it works just fine.  Hope this helps someone,
somewhere, sometime.  Yay for the Hands-On Imperative!


-- 
Russell Senior, Secretary
russell at personaltelco.net



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