smartmic / elogger

Energy Logger 4000 binary data conversion to human readable text

Energy logger data extraction

Introduction

elogger will read binary files recorded by VOLTCRAFT ENERGY LOGGER 3500 or 4000 and outputs the physical data in ASCII text format for easy plotting or postprocessing. The current implementation is limited to the binary DATA file type of the Energy Logger.

This project is targeted to GNU/Linux or other Unix users who do not want to use the proprietary Windows-based data visualization program as offered by the vendor but prefer free (libre) software where possible. In case of the Energy Logger 4000, it is possible!

Specification

The underlying specification can be found at Conrad. Here you will also find the details about the DATA and INFORMATION file types which the Energy Logger provides.

Usage

If you are an end user

Go to the Releases page and download the latest tarball release (file ending .tar.gz). You need to extract the tarball, build and install the program. To do so, run these commands in the directory where you downloaded or saved the release (replace <major>, <minor> and <revision> with the corresponding version numbers of the downloaded release):

tar xzf elogger-<major>.<minor>.<revision>.tar.gz
cd elogger-<major>.<minor>.<revision>
./configure
make
sudo make install

make install requires root privileges if you wish to install it under the default installation path /usr/local. See ./configure --help for alternative configurations.

Program invocation goes by simply calling:

elogger <binfile>

in the directory where the binary files transfered from the Energy Logger are stored. The output will be given on stdout. You can save it to a file using shell redirection:

elogger <binfile> > output.txt

If you are a developer or maintainer

This project uses the GNU Autotools build system. Make sure you have autoconf >= 2.69 and automake >= 1.16.1 installed on your development system.

Either clone this repository with

git clone [email protected]:smartmic/elogger.git

or download the source code from the release page. Change into the repository and run

autoreconf -i 

to install the required scripts, then build the project as usual with

./configure
make

Contributions are highly welcome!

Status

This is a very early version and needs some more functionality and documentation. Testing was done with an Energy Logger 4000.

Alternatives

There are a number of other open-source project out which will basically do the same. Check them out if they suit your needs better.

http://wiki.td-er.nl/index.php?title=Energy_Logger_3500

http://cel4000.codeplex.com/

https://github.com/Lekensteyn/el4000

Licence

Published under the GNU General Public License, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.txt