At work I use an Agilent 34401A Multimeter. It’s a great device, with a serial RS232 output, which can be connected to a PC. The problem is the software for this is a nightmare (I’m sure it works better on newer Keysight branded models with USB).
The official download is Keysight BenchVue, which requires a separate licence, and also doesn’t seem to work. There is some talk of version 3.7 being a version that works and has a free multimeter mode, however I couldn’t get that to work with the serial meter at all.
After some experimentation I have found a combination of Keysight/Agilent tools which do work fine and backed them up here for future use (Note: These files are Keysight’s property and I am simply mirroring the working versions here to save myself hassle in the future)
- IO Libraries Suite 16.3.17914 (download no longer available)
- DMM Connectivity Utility 1.0.2.0 (download no longer available)
For the price of one of these it really shouldn’t be easier to get a £30 Chinese meter’s software working, but there you go.