For a long time, I was working with a very cheap multimeter, that I picked up somewhere at a sale. But I decided, it is time to upgrade to a bit better tool;-) Of course, when you look at electronics testing/measuring equipment, everybody knows about Fluke. But for me this is just a hobby, so those things are a bit out of my price range.
After long days thinking about it and searching the net, I eventually found the UT61E, which looks like a very nice tool. It also supports data logging to a computer which might come in handy at times;-) So that’s what I settled on.
After I got the DMM, pretty much the first thing I tried, was the connection to my Linux laptop via the UNI-T USB cable. I saw before, that it should work. But it turned out a bit more involved than expected. The best resource was probably Rainer Wetzel’s page to the UT61E . But I was also running into the `suspend’ problem. So the next page is UT61 , which has the trick with the suspend.
But overall, I did not like the idea to run everything as root as both pages suggest/require. So I wrote a little udev rules file, with seems to take care of both problems;-)
# UNI-T USB Adapter # This file should be installed to /etc/udev/rules.d so that you can access the Adapter without being root # # type this at the command prompt: sudo cp 99-UNI-T.rules /etc/udev/rules.d
SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ATTR{idVendor}=="1a86", ATTR{idProduct}=="e008", MODE="0666", ATTR{power/level}="auto", ATTR{power/autosuspend}="0"
Install that little file into /etc/udev/rules.d/ and restart udev and the next time you plug the cable in, it should just work without being root;-)
I hope this little gem helps the next guy;-)
Have fun,
— Marco