Data Acquisition - Product Reviews

Generally data acquisition means to acquire data. However, in computer terminology, data acquisition is defined as the process of uniting real world data to produce the data to be maneuvered by the computer system. The data is in the form of waveforms or signals. These signals are obtained using different instruments and devices. The data acquired can be stored on the computer using vendor supplied software and the control can be made with the use of programming languages like Basic, Pascal, FORTRAN, C etc.

Data acquisition systems, as the name suggests are products or systems used to gather data or information from certain source. The data acquisition systems are distinguished on following basis: serial communication, USB, parallel ports and plug-in boards.

Without going much in depth, below are the details of different data acquisition boards.

Signatec PDA1000: This is the data acquisition product made by Signatec. The PDA100 is a 64-bit data acquisition board compatible with PCI device equipments. The "Plug and Play" feature is standard in all PCI devices. The analog bandwidth of DC to 500 MHz and digitization rate of up to 1 MHz makes it remarkably unique in its class. The bus that it uses is a Signatec Auxiliary Bus (SAB). This bus can allow data of 500 MB to be transferred per second. Multiple PDA1000 boards can be connected to the same PDA1000 DAQ board in the master-slave configuration through an interconnect port. It has six selectable signals ranging from 200 million volts to a maximum of 3.2 volts.

OME-PCI-1002 series: This data acquisition board is made by Omega. It features 12 bits 110 KHz analog to digital converter PCI board. The PCI board provides 32 single ended or 16 differential inputs along with 16 digital input and 16 digital output channels. This PCI board series provide sampling rate of 110 KS/s. However, it may vary within the series depending on whether the channels are single or multiple. Unlike many other company boards, the omega OME-PCI-1002 comes with software development kit compatible with Windows 98/NT/2000/XP. This software development kit includes DLL files for high level programming languages and OCX files for Active X programming.

iOTech DaqBoard-3000 series: This is a multifunction data acquisition board embedded with four 1 MHz PCI boards. Unlike OME-PCI-1002 board, this board has 16 single-ended or 8 differential analog inputs with the option to expand them up to 64 single-ended or 32 differential analog inputs. DaqBoard-3000 series has 24 high-speed digital I/O lines. There are four 32 bit counter input channels with quadrature encoder capability. It supports multiple DMA channels and USB version of this board is also available in market.

Advantech PCI-1670: This is a high performance PCI board with GBIB interface. PCI-1670 board works fully with IEEE 488.1 and 488.2 standards. It has full functionality with windows 95/98/NT/2000/XP and MS-DOS operating systems. The "Plug and Play" feature automatically assigns I/O address and provides powerful and easy to use configuration utility. It also has full support for drivers and libraries of C/C++, C++ Builder, Visual Basic and Labview.

Michael Russell

Your Independent guide to Data Acquisition

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