Stop me from buying this bench DMM before it's too late...

[Paul Marossy]

Lieutenant O'hourra ( can spell ) was a BABE

I used to think the same thing.  

OK, I'll turn this thread back over now...  :wink:

[ExpAnonColin]

Do you have a mac with a "serial" connection ?  I just had to buy a "Griffin G port" adapter, it gives you a serial port from any newer mac's modem connection, (G4/G5) they can be a bit "twitchy" though,  be warned !

I don't on this G4, no...  I don't think it's quite worth it at this point, although graphing things would be nice.  I just can't find any "Convert to mac, use this program, bam" sort of setup going on.

Thread hijacks are OK, they keep the thread bumped!

-Colin

[Peter Snowberg]

For a serial port, I would start with a USB serial adapter. Hopefully most of them are fairly standard RS-232C these days. Real Mac serial ports were RS-422 which through the right cabling could be turned into RS-423 which works with most serial accessories. What a pain. Anyway.... any serial adapter should have a driver that makes the port available to software that speaks to the standard two Mac serial ports.

Once you have that you could use something like RealBASIC to write a simple display routine. Assuming the meter is the continuous send type, you would read the serial port until you saw the "start" character which flags the start of each data "frame". You would read the serial data until you saw the "end of line" character (whatever that is for that meter) and then you can decode the data frame you just read. Chances are very good that only one or two characters are used to describe the range and mode of the meter and the rest of the data is going to be the numbers on the display.

I don't know what options areavailable in the Mac world these days. Any Hypercard or BASIC like language would work, it's just a matter of being able to read serial ports.

You should be able to run a terminal program like ZTerm to see what the meter is doing.

[ExpAnonColin]

For a serial port, I would start with a USB serial adapter. Hopefully most of them are fairly standard RS-232C these days. Real Mac serial ports were RS-422 which through the right cabling could be turned into RS-423 which works with most serial accessories. What a pain. Anyway.... any serial adapter should have a driver that makes the port available to software that speaks to the standard two Mac serial ports.

Once you have that you could use something like RealBASIC to write a simple display routine. Assuming the meter is the continuous send type, you would read the serial port until you saw the "start" character which flags the start of each data "frame". You would read the serial data until you saw the "end of line" character (whatever that is for that meter) and then you can decode the data frame you just read. Chances are very good that only one or two characters are used to describe the range and mode of the meter and the rest of the data is going to be the numbers on the display.

I don't know what options areavailable in the Mac world these days. Any Hypercard or BASIC like language would work, it's just a matter of being able to read serial ports.

You should be able to run a terminal program like ZTerm to see what the meter is doing.

Thanks, that makes sense for sure.  I've programmed in BASIC as well as C++ and RealBasic () before as far as computer languages go, but it's been a while for all of them and I didn't get super in depth.

-Colin