EEVblog Electronics Community Forum
Products => Test Equipment => Topic started by: AndyC_772 on February 18, 2015, 12:45:52 pm
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Hi all,
I have a project which requires accurate measurement and logging of a voltage over a period of time.
I have a Keithley 2000 DMM, which has a serial port on the back. I feel there ought to be some data logging software out there which can periodically query the DMM reading, store it and plot a chart, but I can't find anything.
This must be a common requirement, so apologies if I'm missing something obvious.
Could someone please point me to the logging software that everyone uses?
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I am not aware of any available program which will do this without some setting up. I think most people would use labview, but that would involve adding and connecting all the different parts (I don't use labview).
For any logging that I end up doing, I tend to write a simple script in python that dumps the data to disk and then use gnuplot to create a graph. It's not as nice as a simple, single GUI, but it does allow it to be quite configurable.
On a side note, I have never got my Keithley 2000 to work properly over the serial interface - I have never had much need to log from it as I have a 34461A, with its nice USB interface. But the last time I looked at it, it looked like it was producing +/- 10V serial, which was throwing my USB serial converter off. So it might be worth checking if your serial converter (I'm guessing you're probably not using a computer with a real serial port) works at these voltages.
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I've used a Keithley 2000 with GPIB or RS232 using MATLAB a bit recently. You will need to check that the settings on the instrument match the config on the PC, parity, stop bits etc. The programming manual is a bit confusing but all you need to do is send commands using query() and fprint() functions. It shouldn't be too much work to get the script to output a csv with timestamps and readings.
The free option would be to use one of the python frameworks to help you write some simple code to output the data. But I haven't done this yet.
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I used the RS232 port under LabView to log some measurements at work. As I remembee to a maximum of 17 readings/sec
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You can read data from your Keithley directly into Excel using Agilent VISA and a few lines of VBA code. I have done this with my Keithley 2015 and a USB-GPIB converter, but RS232 should also work.
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Keithley have software tool for 2000 as well here : ExceLINX-3A Software Version C02 (for Model 2000) (Windows 7, Vista, XP Compatible) (http://www.keithley.com/data?asset=58292).
Did not try it myself tho, as my only 2000 is broken and not repaired yet. For 2001's,2002,2400,2510 I am using LabView VIs.