Target hardware:
Software repository location:
The issue this software solves:
Although the Voltcraft multimeter and the UNI-T USB cable areĀ hardware compatible (the USB cable adapter fits into the multimeter connector perfectly), the software requirements are different. Original Voltcraft USB cable, which costs tripple the UNI-T cable by the way, mimics RS232 adapter when plugged in USB host PC. The UNI-T cable uses different chip internally and behaves like a HID device. On the other hand, UNI-T multimeters use different communication protocol over the serial line than the VC870 does.
This software package is composed of two independent parts:
1. USB cable interface in the utd04-cable directory,
2. multimeter protocol decoder in the vc870-decode directory.
The USB cable interface is adapted from other work, see copyrights in the directory. Compile according to instructions in the utd04-cable/readme.2.txt file.
The multimeter protocol decoder is a perl script. Use in a pipe together with the cable interface:
./utd04-cable/utd04-cable -b9600 | ./vc870-decode/vc870-decode.pl
The above commands need to be run under root (su) because of USB access permissions required in the cable interface program.
Note that I have not tested the protocol decoder extensively, there may be bugs (particularly in range decoding).
Or just using sigrok:
sigrok-cli -d voltcraft-vc870:conn=1a86.e008 --continuous