IT's 130V on our 120VAC line, and it's time to another...
SERVICE NIGHT(tm)!(sponsored by "TekPower" and their sucky DMM software supplied in MiniCD-Rs with cute pandas stamped on them)Tonight i've got this:
...it's a not-so-expensive
TekPower TP4000ZC DMM (sorry, Everdrive... maybe in 2011
). I got bored of my cheap
pirate YX-360TR, and instead got that one, that features lots of measurement types, a temperature probe (hi, Cartman!), and a RS232 interface! A old-skool COM port, nice
Let's test in Marika:
Wow, InstallShit does WORK on this thing! No crashes, no weird stuff... just loooooooooooooong wait times (this box prefers Wise or Inno Setup, FYI)
The software (coded by "Kaito Electronic, Inc", the seller of this thing) is an absolute piece of crap made on VB6. And while it works on my 386, it SUCKS - it's really slow, the graph thingy does not work, and the UI locks until I disable RS232 in the meter, as VB6 drawing routines are slow as fuck in a 'SX.
Obviously i had to find another PC to run this thing, It would be piece of cake in a ideal world... except for the following facts:
- None of my laptops have COM ports.
- COM->USB converters are not really cheap over here.
...so i had to resort to this:
redirect the COM port over LAN to any of my other boxes with serial ports. The original plan was to use
socat with Saki, but unfortunately its COM ports are fried since... like forever
So this left me with only one option: Marika. This means finding a COM port redirector that works on Win95 and didn't crashed on a 386SX.
After like 3 hours, testing countless of shitware coded in VB6, i finally settled with
Comfoolery (neat name FTW!), a cool lightweight COM port server that runs blazin' fast on Marika. While Comfoolery author used Lantronix DeviceComm as the client for creating the virtual ports, it was too slow for the DMM app (it crashed because DeviceComm took too long to connect to the port), but there is
HW Virtual Serial Port, which, as a bonus, isn't coded in VB6, and it's free as in beer
(Port settings: 2400 baud, no parity, 8 data bits, 1 stop bit)
Under Linux, however, things were much more difficult, since COM port access on Wine is full of fail. Fortunately, there is
QtDMM, which supports the binary protocol used by the 4000ZC. However, it does not support direct network connections, it wants actual serial devices. No problem - socat to the rescue!
sudo socat PTY,link=/dev/ttyS0,raw,echo=0 TCP4:192.168.0.111:5750 &
sudo chmod 666 /dev/ttyS0
The first line connects to the redirected COM port by Comfoolery, while the second sets the correct device permissions, so QtDMM can use it. On QtDMM "Port Settings", use these settings:
- Enable "External Device setup" to bypass the COM port settings
- Port: /dev/ttyS0
- Protocol: 14 bytes binary, continuous (VC820)Now, ENJOY! You can now share your cheap DMM with the world. Wanna check my overvolted 120VAC line?
Fuck USB, i've just saved $15 thanks to Marika
Experiment result: Total Success, thanks to Comfoolery, HW VSP, socat, and some old ALi chipset from 1993