QtDMM

From Noah.org
Revision as of 16:19, 14 January 2010 by Root (talk | contribs) (moved Qtdmm to QtDMM)
Jump to navigationJump to search


QtDMM is an almost great GUI interface to Digital MultiMeters that have a computer interface. I say it's almost great because it's very simple and slick -- a tiny tool that does a lot -- but it suffers from some glaring flaws that almost make it unusable (but not quite). The worst flaw is that import and export of test data does not work. You can export the data, but it screws up the recorded data by saving every sample with the same date-time stamp -- and without fractions of a second which is critical since you can sample every 100 milliseconds. But you can throw out the time since you know the sample rate and that's usually good enough. Second, you cannot import the data files you export. It always gives an error or the application just crashes with a message that only says "Aborted". Finally, just in general use the application has a tendency to just crash only saying "Aborted"... But the tool is too nice to ignore. One of these days I want to fix these bugs. The first step would be to increase the error logging. There has got to be some way to get it to say something more helpful than "Aborted".

An alternative to QtDMM is ZMeter.

To build it you need the qt3-dev libraries. Unpack the tarball. Set the QTDIR environment variable! The following is for building under Ubuntu, but other distros are probably not much different:

aptitude install qt3-dev-tools
tar 
export QTDIR=/usr/share/qt3/
./configure
make

I use a RadioShack Model #22-812. I'm not normally a fan of anything from RadioShack, but this meter is very inexpensive and it has a very functional RS-232 serial interface.