Downloading¶

Data downloading works by simply listening on the serial line, and saving whatever the instrument sends. Some instruments have their own data formats (maybe even a complete ASCII representation of their internal database), others might use more common interchange formats.

Some formats have an end-of-file (EOF) marker, some instruments send an EOF marker regardless of the format (e.g. when the transfer is finished a Trimble M3 sends an EOF that is simply END), this can be specified as an option to automatically finish the transfer when this marker sequence is received. Other formats (like the Leica GSI) do not have such a marker. In these cases the transfer will be closed if no data was received in the timeout window (timeout based automatic closing only occurs if the download at least started). When the automatic closing is disabled, the transfer has to be manually closed (with keyboard interrupt), once all data was received.

To help detecting when the transfer finished, the output is always printed to the standard output, even if an output file is specified.

Caution

The output in the terminal might not be a 100% accurate representation of the received data. The data might by partially or completely binary, which cannot be accurately represented with ASCII characters in the terminal (non-ASCII bytes are replaced with ? symbols in the terminal output).

Requirements¶

Instrument capable of serial ASCII data transfer

Examples¶

Downloading Trimble M5 format¶

iman download data --eof END -b 38400 COM4 data.m5

Usage¶

iman download data¶

Receive data sent from the instrument.

This command is intended to receive and save ASCII or extended ASCII documents line by line, such as typical data exports from instruments.

To sucessfully receive the data, the program has to be started before the instrument starts sending the lines.

Since not all ASCII export formats have an EOF marker, the download can be closed by two mechanisms if no marker is set. The process can be closed manually by keyboard interrupt once all data expected was received. Alternatively the process can close automatically at the first connection timeout (only if a first line was ever received, otherwise the program waits indefinitely and has to be interrupted manually).

iman download data [OPTIONS] PORT

Options

-b, --baud <baud>¶

Serial speed

Options:¶: 1200 | 2400 | 4800 | 9600 | 19200 | 38400 | 56000 | 57600 | 115200 | 230400 | 921600

-t, --timeout <timeout>¶: Serial timeout

-o, --output <output>¶: File to save received data

--eof <eof>¶: End-of-file marker (i.e. the last line to receive)

--autoclose, --no-autoclose¶: Close transfer automatically upon timeout or when EOF is received

--include-eof, --no-include-eof¶: Wether the EOF marker is part of the output format (or just sent by the instrument regardless of the format in question)

Arguments

PORT¶

Required argument

Serial port that the instrument is connected to (must be a valid identifier like COM1 or /dev/usbtty0)