TMC Linux Software Wanted
Well, before I up and call LUFA essentially mature and complete, I’ve got one more class driver to implement, USB Test and Measurement Class (USBTMC). This is the class used in scientific and analytical products such as USB-enabled multimeters and power supplies, for direct control and reporting from a PC. It’s also fairly uncommon in use outside LabView and custom software, so Windows doesn’t have native drivers for it. That’s partly the reason why I’ve avoided it thus far; without drivers, I can’t test it at all. The other reason is I don’t have any USBTMC class USB devices, so I can’t write a host driver either.
Now that I have a Linux machine going with native USBTMC drivers and nothing much else to do, I want to go ahead and complete a device class driver for it. However, my last roadblock is finding some free Linux software which I can use to evaluate my class driver. I don’t care what it is – just as long as I can load it in Ubuntu, and have it connect to my custom USBTMC driver device so that I can send and receive messages to confirm that it works. Some sort of visualization would be even better, so I can report voltages from the ADC and display them to the host as a demo application. I’m at a bit of a loss as to what I can use however, so now I turn to the general community. Can someone point me in the direction of some suitable software?
University starts for a new semester tomorrow, so my holidays are now officially up for a while. Boo.
For what it is worth, Agilent’s documentation shows a few examples of software talking to USBTMC device via the Linux USBTMC driver:
http://www.home.agilent.com/upload/cmc_upload/All/usbtmc.htm
The most relevant bits would be under the headings “Use models” and “Example Programs”.
It works for me under Ubunutu to talk to a commercial USBTMC device, although I have to re-run the “usbtmc_load” script after each time I reboot the PC.
Expanding on what I said in the previous comment…
There appears to be a USBTMC driver bundled into kernel modules that come with Ubuntu (at least with the version I have).
However, there is a discussion on the linux.kernel newsgroup as to how this is broken. It looks like there are some kernel patches that might fix it, but this is presumably too bleeding edge for a Ubunutu package.
So, the usbtmc_load script is needed to rmmod the default USBTMC driver and insmod in the Agilent USBTMC driver.
Thanks Peter! Will take a look when I get a chance.
Cheers!
– Dean