dawm - Data analysis with multimeters

HP 3457A 6.5 digit multimeter
dawn is a free software package, that may be downloaded here which is designed to allow data to be collected from professional quality multimeters via the GPIB bus. It has only been tested on the HP 3457A (6.5 digits, shown above) but is expected to work on the HP or Agilent 3458A (8.5 digits). Others can perhaps add support for other multimeters

dawm has only current been tested on a Sun workstation running the Solaris operating system, but is expectd to work on other UNIX distributiojns, or Linux. The code is command line driven, and should also work on Windows, but this has not beene tested. Should anyone produce a Windows executable, I will upload it here

Measuring AC voltage on an HP 3457A

Here is an example of usage, in this case collecting data on the mains voltage by using the AC voltage scale. The default GPIB address (22) is used.

sparrow /export/home/drkirkby/dawm-0.51/src % dawm --ACV HP3457A 10
HP3457A
236.07410E+00
235.44460E+00
235.91100E+00
235.90100E+00
235.89110E+00
235.90970E+00
236.23350E+00
236.23800E+00
dawm_stopfile.22.txt: No such file or directory

Measuring frequency on an HP 3457A

This example shows the frequency (in Hz) being measured, this time for 20 seconds, not 10 as in the previous example

sparrow /export/home/drkirkby/dawm-0.51/src % dawm --FREQ HP3457A 20
HP3457A
50.014711E+00
50.015406E+00
50.015917E+00
50.016704E+00
50.016283E+00
50.017676E+00
50.019904E+00
50.020971E+00
50.021800E+00
50.019388E+00
50.017720E+00
50.016798E+00
dawm_stopfile.22.txt: No such file or directory

Measuring period on an HP 3457A

and finally the period (in seconds):

sparrow /export/home/drkirkby/dawm-0.51/src % dawm --PERIOD HP3457A 10
HP3457A
19.997136E-03
19.996118E-03
19.995709E-03
19.995062E-03
19.994282E-03
19.993931E-03
dawm_stopfile.22.txt: No such file or directory

Specifying a GPIB address to use

All the above examples show the use of the default GPIB address, which was 22. This time the GPIB address will be set directly, overriding the default. Since there is only one meter on my GPIB bus, this produces an error

sparrow /export/home/drkirkby/dawm-0.51/src % dawm --ACV --GPIB-address 10 HP3457A 5
Sorry, there does not appear to be a functioning HP3457A on GPIB address 10
Check the instrument is powered up and on the correct GPIB address

Note that in each case, the program tries at the end to remove the file 'dawm_stopfile.22.txt' but fails. This file can be used to stop data collection at any point, in a clean manner. Here dawm will be configured to measure AC voltage for a very long time (1e7 seconds), but this terminated when the file dawm_stopfile.22.txt is created.

dawm is written and supported by Dr. David Kirkby, who may be contacted by e-mail