Data Acquisition – Product Reviews
In general, data acquisition means acquiring data. However, in computer terminology, data acquisition is defined as the process of putting together data from the real world to produce the data that the computer system will handle. The data is in the form of waveforms or signals. These signals are obtained using different instruments and devices. The acquired data can be stored in the computer using the software supplied by the supplier and the control can be performed with the use of programming languages such as Basic, Pascal, FORTRAN, C, etc.
Data acquisition systems, as the name suggests, are products or systems that are used to collect data or information from a certain source. Data acquisition systems are distinguished based on the following: serial communication, USB, parallel ports and plug-in cards.
Without going too deep, the different data acquisition boards are detailed below.
Signatec PDA1000: This is the data acquisition product manufactured by Signatec. The PDA100 is a 64-bit data acquisition board compatible with PCI device kits. The “Plug and Play” feature is standard on all PCI devices. Analog bandwidth from DC to 500 MHz and digitization rate of up to 1 MHz make it remarkably one of a kind. The bus he uses is a Signatec Auxiliary Bus (SAB). This bus can allow data transfer of 500 MB per second. Multiple PDA1000 cards can be connected to the same PDA1000 DAQ card in a master-slave configuration via 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 manufactured by Omega. It features a 12-bit, 110KHz 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 series of PCI boards provides a sampling rate of 110KS/s. However, it can vary within the series depending on whether the channels are single or multiple. Unlike many of the company’s other boards, the omega OME-PCI-1002 comes with a Windows 98/NT/2000/XP compatible software development kit. 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 multi-function data acquisition board integrated with four 1 MHz PCI boards. Unlike the OME-PCI-1002 board, this board has 16 single-ended or 8 differential analog inputs with the Option to expand up to 64 single-ended or 32 differential analog inputs. The 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 the USB version of this board is also available on the market.
Advantech PCI-1670: This is a high performance PCI board with GBIB interface. The PCI-1670 board fully supports the 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” function automatically assigns the I/O address and provides a powerful and easy-to-use configuration utility. It also has full support for C/C++ drivers and libraries, C++ Builder, Visual Basic and Labview.