Saturday, May 29, 2010

Data Acquisition Systems- Checklist

This post will give you a basic idea of Data Acquisition system and the daq modules that used for acquiring data, processing data, converting, transmitting and etc.
Data acquisition (DAQ) is the most important task for a system that involves the processing of signals. Collecting the correct data and analyzing it correctly is critical as its  application fall under many complex applications in health-care, automation, control systems and more. DAQ systems need to acquire data to test a system, then analyze it and give feedback signal to the system.

The applications of DAQ have their own requirement of speed of acquiring, converting from transducer signals to respective digital codes, transferring, interfacing data. High speed data acquisition systems are essential in military and space applications and real time operating systems. The use of wireless technology, image processing algorithms, ADC's with high resolution has increased and pc based data acquisition systems are used by several industrial fields, so that new DAQ modules or components have made much smaller, faster and cheaper today.


Some applications in aerospace and defense industry requires high speed digitization of signals received from radars or surveillance systems. Here the data sampling requirement is high and we need to have sustained data throughout. The data transfer interfaces for a daq related with testing and measurement using computers so USB and IEEE 1394 buses are available for external data transfer. USB daq cards provides analog input channels, analog output channels also digital I/O channels and counter/timer channels with baud rate of 480 Mbps.

Checklist For a DAQ system

1. Sensor
Sensor is the main input device that sent data to system. It is necessary to have knowledge about your signal and transducer well. because lot of people make mistake in selecting proper sensor device which may affects the performance of the entire system.

2. Signal conditioning
The acquired signal may show variation so the signal conditioning requirement is also vary. You should have necessary knowledge about signal conditioning and proper consultation.

3. Analog to digital conversion (ADC)
The transfer rate is truly depends upon how you selected the ADC. For high speed transfer, you will need to use better ADC.

4. Interface

As the signal is transferred to the storage device or PC for analysis, select the bus through which you want to communicate.

5. Drivers
A daq driver is one which make your system future proof. A good driver allows you to compensate the gap between application hardware and software.

6. Application software
It's the software logical part of our daq system. It allows user to set up different channels, analyze the individually to get desired result.

Custom Search

0 comments:

Post a Comment

Related Posts with Thumbnails
 
Technology blogs & blog posts Technology blogs .CO.NR Free Domain Alitu.com - General Website Directory
Powered by Blogger