Voltcraft 4080

Voltcraft 4080

Status	in progress
Source code	serial-lcr
Counts	20000
IEC 61010-1	—
Connectivity	USB, RS232
Measurements	resistance, capacitance, inductance
Features	autorange, relative, auto-poweroff, min-max, tolerance
Website	conrad.com

The Voltcraft 4080 is an LCR meter with USB connectivity.

The PeakTech 2165 appears to be another rebrand. It is described as 4.5 digits (20000 count) LCR meter with 0.5% basic accuracy (resistance) that can measure at 120Hz and 1kHz, and comes with USB connectivity (serial protocol).

See Voltcraft_4080/Info for USB details.

Hardware

LCR meter:

• TI TLC7135C ADC, 4 1/2 digits, 1Ksa/s
• TI MSP430 MCU
• several discrete TI components

USB to IR cable:

• FT232R, regular serial port, bidirectional (RX and TX LED)

Photos

• 

  Device, top

• 

  Terminal session

• 

  Open case, bird's view (shield, beeper, vertical DC and IR board, battery clip, spare fuse (clockwise))

• 

  PCB top view

• 

  PCB, zoom in on MCU and ADC

• 

  Display, all segments on (not all indicators applicable to this device)

• 

  Case, receptables for external power and IR communication

• 

  IR adapter, RX and TX LEDs, third leg for mechanical fitness

Protocol

Serial communication runs at 1200/7e1, uses ASCII characters and is basically human readable. You can access the device with e.g. a terminal program like CuteCom.

Serial packets consist of 39 ASCII characters that end in the CR-LF termination, contain a lot of single character flags, as well as multiple multi-character fields for the primary and secondary displays.

The description of the commands you find at Conrad. The PeakTech 2165 user manual has another description, represented differently.

When the device does not respond it might be in setup mode. You can see that in the display. But the software can not. So it might be a good idea to do an initialization with [BXXXXXX] to stop the setup mode. This only works for a setup mode that was requested by an earlier remote session. You can not leave a manual setup mode this way.

Some findings not mentioned in the protocol definition above; without waranty:

Disabling keys

Sending

A

responds with

REMOTE READY..

and says RS232 in the display.

Keys on device are disabled.

Enabling keys

Sending

B

responds with

REMOTE STOP...

Keys on device are enabled.

Resources

• Voltcraft 4080 product page at Conrad
• Protocol summary at Conrad
• PeakTech 2165 product page
• PeakTech user manual bilingual (German/English), see chapter 7 for the protocol