Data acquisition is the process of measuring physical world conditions and phenomena such as electricity, sound, temperature and pressure. This is done through the use of various sensors which sample the environment’s analog signals and transform them to digital signals using an analog-to-digital converter. The resulting digital numeric values can then be directly manipulated by a computer, allowing for the analysis, storage and presentation of these data.
Data acquisition is primarily done using a combination of instruments and tools that form a data acquisition system (DAQ or DAS). The DAS samples the environmental signals and transforms these to machine-readable signals, while the software processes the acquired data for storage or presentation.
- There are three components required for data acquisition:
- Sensors that are able to capture environmental analog signals like temperature, pressure, light or sound.
- Signal-conditioning circuitry that normalizes captured signals; noise reducers and amplifiers are good examples.
- Analog-to-digital converter that converts the conditioned signals into digital data.
Specific DAQs are often created for specific physical properties. For example, there are dedicated systems for measuring just temperature or just pressure, but smaller dedicated data acquisition systems can be integrated into a bigger system via software by simply taking the data gathered by those individual systems and presenting them to the user.
Microtech Industries manufacture Data Acquisition System product for developing ultimate instrument solutions. These solutions measure a wide range of signals for both test and measurement and Industrial applications. The three components of DAS based solutions are Hardware, Driver Software and Application Software. As these components should work together, our hardware products are designed and tested with the driver and application software for integrated performance under Windows 98 & XP. A sixteen channels data acquisition system (DAS) consists of a signal conditioner followed by an Analog to Digital converter. The digital outputs are stored in the computer.
The systems contains :
- External sixteen channel DAS
- Software
Specifications :
- 16 channels; 8 / 4 / 2 bit resolution.
- Data collection speed: variable (max 10 sample / sec)
- Analog input: 0 to 5V.
- On line & real time Graphical display of 16 channels
- Calibration Factor: Suitable user defined multiplication factor can be set to get the actual physical measurement; Additive and Multiplicative.
- Provisions for start and stop facilities
- Saving of data in user defined file name in text ( ASCII) format.
- Save data can be imported in Excel for other analysis.
- Calculation of Statistical parameters, viz. Mean, Variance, S.D, Histogram, Cp and Cpk.
- Selection of cutoff point.
- X-Y Plot
- FFT
- Zoom facility for any channel
- Print of zoomed graph with proper title
- Graphical View, Data View, Meter View
Operating system : Window XP, Window 7.
- DAS Interface software.
- DAS statistical software.