An analysis and description of the USB protocol can be found at https://lukasschwarz.de/ut61b.
The driver bases on the libusb library which has to be installed. Compile the program with a simple
make
This creates the commandline tool ut61b_cli in a build/ subfolder.
In order to grant the libusb library access to the usb device, the capturing program has to be run as root. Alternatively, an udev rule can be applied, which grants access at user level. An example rule is found in utils/88-ut61b.rules. Copy this file to /etc/udev/rules.d/ and reload the udev rules with
udevadm control --reload-rules
udevadm trigger
- connect multimeter with the serial-to-usb cable
- power on multimeter
- enable serial data transmission via long pressing of REL button
- start capturing data via ut61b_cli
Running the commandline tool ut61b_cli shows the live data. Passing a log file argument via
ut61b_cli -f <file>
saves all the data into the file. Capturing is stopped via the key-stroke ctrl+c or passing a maximum time or frame count via
ut61b_cli -n <frames> -t <time>
The simple script utils/ut61b_gp runs gnuplot to show the live data graphically. Usage
ut61b_gp <ut61b_cli> <file>
<ut61b_cli> : path to ut61b_cli binary
<file> : path to logfile