[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
More information about the PLUG
mailing list