Let's say I have an old appliance that I plug into a wall socket. I need to check exactly how much voltage and current this appliance is using. I also need to get these readings to a PC running a program that will deem the appliance compliant with specific standards.

Long story short, is there a device out there that can measure voltage and current and send them to a PC via RS232? It needs to be industry grade, DIN mounted if possible, and doesn't need to have a digital readout. I don't care what the voltage or current reads, but the computer will.

Thanks for any help.

 

There are lots of ways to do this, with the best solution depending upon what sort of specs you need. Newer hardware tends to use Ethernet rather than serial though. Try Keithley, Advantech, and
Acromag. There are others, but these should give you an idea of what can be done.

 

There are many dmms that will do this. And being Instruments designed by instrument people they will do it accurately. And they will be much cheaper being high volume items, than any black box you may find. I know MCM carries at least one in the Tenma line Also Newark, being the same company. You may want two, one dedicated to voltage and one to current as most share terminals for the two functions. I'm sure Fluke and all the other meter companies you can think of also have these but often their software is interactive and thus hard to use in this application. I have done something like this for a home energy audit system and the meters were spec'd better and cost less than one of the CTs you would need for the commercial tools for this. I wrote a small C program to poll the meters and calculate various things from the readings.

Regards
cww

 

Thanks so much for your help guys. I really appreciate it.