Some days ago I was looking for a temperature monitoring solution for some rooms and 19″-racks at the university. The Arexx TL-500 looked promising and I bought it. Unfortunately there are only Windows drivers available. But some people already analyzed the communication protocol and hacked a simple version of a linux driver:
http://www.algorithm-forge.com/techblog/2010/01/linux-usb-driver-for-the-arexx-tl-500-part-ii/
There’s even a small logger hardware (ARM-based) using this device:
http://rndhax.blogspot.com/2010/03/friendlyarm-mini2440-arexx-tl-500.html
As a python fan I couldn’t resist porting this to python to get a small and flexible script. It can be easily extended to save the data, create charts (maybe using matplotlib) or present a web interface.
By looking at the raw data I noticed that bytes 6 and 7 (maybe more?) contain a time value. Maybe it counts the seconds since the initialization of the device?
The first version of my script is mainly a port of the C program. The script uses pyusb 1.0, a python wrapper for libusb 1.0. You may have to install it manually, most linux distributions come with older versions.
http://download.j-raedler.de/Python/pyArexx/tl500_v0.2.zip
I plan to extend this to a python package using OO, cleaner interfaces, better error handling and more.
As being a Beginner, I’m usually searching on the internet for content articles that can help me. Thank you
Hi Jon,
this code records the values read from ALL connected sensors. I use it to record values from 4 different temperature sensors. Please have a look at the newer version, which is more flexible but still a little bit unstable.
Joerg
I’m not much of a Python coder :S, does this record outputs from multiple sensors?