multimeter GVA-18B protocol & dump tool

posted by on 2012.02.04, under electronics, programming
04:

A wile ago I bought an inexpensive multimeter on ebay: G VA 18 B. For ~30€ it comes with autorange measurement for voltage, current, frequency, resistant, capacity and … temperature (with an internal and external sensor). The meter has serial interface based on an infrared diode on the top.The connection to the pc is done with a CP2030-based serial-usb adapter cable (also in the package).

GVA18B, also sold as VA18

GVA18B, also sold as VA18

Unhappily the offered software won’t work for me – it does not see the virtual COM-port (and it only works on Windows). So I decided to write my own. I connected to the meter via putty – and got only binary crap. With the help of some lines C# (I decided to train my C#-„skills“ – can’t remember the reason) to dump the output in hex/binary and some sample data I figured out the protocol… great hardware but ugly protocol. It seems our friends in HongKong simply map the data of the display controller to some bytes… The facts:

Every sample is decoded into 14 bytes. The high-nibble of each byte contains the position within the stream (bits 4,5,6,7; P={16,32,48,64,..,224} or shifted by 4 bits P={1,..14}). The bytes 1, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14 containing control informations about the selected unit, the range and further functions. The table below shows witch bit in each byte is set for a specific function (high nibble set to zero, first number is decimal value, in brackets the relevant bits):

Each numeric position on the display is encoded into a pair of bytes [1,2], …, [7,8]. The association is given in the following graphic. Bytes 1,3,5,7 represent position „a“, 2,4,6,8 position „b“:

The meaning of Bit 3 in byte „a“ depends on the position of the digit. For the leftmost digit it indicates a leading minus. For the other positions it indicates that the digit is the first part of the fraction.

In the attached code you find a class that handles all the encoding stuff – GVA18BProtocolDecoder. You can drop the received data into it – it does the rest. For simple use it offers an interface for registering a handler that is called when new data arrives. The data can then be fetched by using some convenience methods. The dump2display does what is names – it simply puts the data on the screen (and shows how to use the decoder). And yes, the code is over sized and not very sexy – yet. But it is under the GPL3 – use it as you can: GVA18BDataDump

comment

Thanks, it’s a Very good Job, I’m going to use it for a Java application.
The code is very clear and well remarked.

Franco ( 07/06/2012 um 12:14 Uhr )

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