Re: Household electrical current to Excel ???

[Palindr☻me <sb382638@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Duncan McNiven wrote:
> On Tue, 30 Aug 2005 17:54:06 +0100, Palindr?me
> <sb382638@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>
>>Here is one for 29.99GBP
>
>
> Much more attractive price!
>
>
>>The software is pretty rudimentary, but you can just log it into
>>hyperterm and then cut and paste it into Excel..
>
>
> Have you tried it? Does it pump out readings periodically or on
> demand? Is the protocol documented so you can write your own software?
>

You can pose those questions on the maplin web site. One of the ones I
have free runs and samples every second and outputs a fixed baudrate
ASCII string after each data capture. Others output in response to a
single character input. If you set terminal echo on, /some/ models of
the latter will take one of the echo characters as the trigger and just
keep doing conversion after conversion. It doesn't seem to matter that
it is getting many trigger characters that it doesn't use. I can't
promise that this little klduge will always work though.


Thus the protocol is very, very simple and it would be a doddle to write
your own software - assuming that you /can/ write software, that is!
There are public domain libriaries/dll for Windows that make it easy to
set up and utilise a serial port - although development envirnments like
Delphi often already have them.

--
Sue