zmeter

zmeter is a serial interface for the RadioShack 22-812 digital multimeter. It listens to the specified serial port and prints the meter reading on standard output (stdout). zmeter operates by waiting for data from the digital multimeter to appear on the serial port and then passing that data to a child process to be formatted and output. It was derived from slsnif with most of the interesting features cut out and a small amount of original code added to support the 22812 data format. zmeter has been tested on Debian, Slackware and Red Hat Linux. Zmeter development started out on Slackware and is transitioning to Debian.

Features

It works! Just plug the meter into your serial port and run zmeter, you'll have measurements scrolling off your screen in no time.
Simple, autoconf-aided build process: the familiar untar, ./configure, make, make install
up-to-date man page! (zmeter.1)
rc file support tested
--samples (-s) N: Take N samples, then exit.
--verbose (-v): Verbose mode: print extra information.
--version (-V): Print version and copyright information.
--timestamp (-t): inherited from slsnif
Better than three samples per second
GPL'd, woot!

Goals

The goal of the 0.1.x development series is to remove everything that isn't required (and fix bugs). This will be followed by the new stable series, 0.2.x. The goal of the (future) 0.3.x development series will be to support other DMMs (the RadioShack 22-168 is a possiblity). The eventual goal for 1.0.0 will be a simple, stable, modular, extensible framework for supporting a variety of DMMs with RS-232 interfaces.

What's New

Please see the zmeter project webpage for the latest project information (including bugs, support requests, patches, feature requests, forums and mailing lists.

7-Aug-2005

Neglected but not forgotten, I have added historical versions 0.0.3 and 0.0.4 to the CVS zmeter-stable tree. I hope to figure out branching the CVS code base in order to make "zmeter-stable" and "zmeter-devel" trees. Maybe even soon. IIRC, there is about a 24 hour lag between when I "CVS commit" changes and when the show up in ViewCVS. I hope to verify this tomorrow.

What's Old

5-Jun-2004

Here's a preliminary test program that seems to overcome the bugs in zmeter-0.1.x. I'll incorporate the fixes into zmeter as I get time.

25-Apr-2004

Ok, I think I've got a handle on putting stuff into CVS now. Currently zmeter-stable has an initial checkin of the zmeter-0.0.1 release, and I think I've just committed the changes from the zmeter-0.0.2 release. I'm not quite sure why they don't show up, but I'll take another crack at this later. My current goal is to finish populating CVS with the rest of the historical zmeter releases in order to establish "stable" and "development" branches. Development will resume at that point.

24-Apr-2004

Historical zmeter releases (both "stable" and new "development" versions) are now available from the SourceForge.net zmeter file download page.

Why SourceForge.net?

It's been nearly two years since zmeter first hit the net. Since then I've been through three (or is it four now?) Internet Service Providers, and although I've tried to keep the Freshmeat.net page up to date I have still seen a distressing number of postings via Google Groups searching for the present location of zmeter. It's high time zmeter had a stable home. Hence SourceForge.net. Please be patient while I try to wrap my head around effectively using SourceForge.net.

This page was last updated on 7-Aug-2005, 1318 CDT