Over the past 30 years the price of hardware has slowly but surely come down, and it’s now possible to buy all manner of widgets and gizmos online for less than the price of a fancy Italian dinner. By and large this is a good thing, but it’s not uncommon to find that your new tools are let down by the software side of things. Of course, you can always develop your own solution – and in [ThePhil]’s case, that’s exactly what he did.

The hardware in question was a PCE-174 luxmeter, which came with an uncooperative Windows application as standard. This simply wouldn’t do, so [ThePhil] set about developing a Linux version in Python. This was achieved through the aid of documentation, not of the PCE-174, but its sibling from another corporation – the Extech HD450. The two meters were similar enough that the Extech’s better documentation was able to fill in the gaps of [ThePhil]’s understanding.

[ThePhil] has diligently implemented the full feature set of the PCE-174, and has documented the project well. There are even notes on the version numbers of various dependencies, which will surely be a great help if someone’s trying to run the code five years down the track.

It’s a great lesson that one need not be at the mercy of the software one is given. For a great many cases, it’s possible to roll your own solutions that are robust and get the job done. This approach can be taken to great lengths – you can go so far as replacing an entire camera firmware, if you so wish.