Modern data acquisition kit has simplified the hardware part of the equation. Today’s data I/O cards are fully plug-and-play under modern versions of Windows so you don’t have to spend time and effort configuring interrupt requests, setting I/O resources and the rest. Many of them are auto-calibrating too.
Even easier is the growing range of devices that simply plug into a spare USB port or Ethernet connection, so you don’t even have to take the case off your PC.
But it’s a different matter when it comes to the software that controls the data acquisition process. The free data logging software that usually comes with your hardware is likely to be very limited in functionality. That’s why the traditional approach has been to write your own program.
Many engineers still like doing this; but if you’re one of them, you have to ask yourself whether writing programs is really the best way to use your time: you’re a design engineer, not a computer boffin.
If you don’t want to get involved with raw code, an alternative is to use one of the graphical programming languages. National Instruments’ LabVIEW and Agilent VEE are two popular examples. A visual programming environment has a lot of advantages; but it’s still programming. You need to think like a programmer to use them: for example, have you remembered to make the call to AI CONFIG before the calls to AI START and AI READ?
Not that much different from Visual Basic really, is it? Except that you’re acquiring skills that aren’t as marketable – or as easy to buy in when you discover how time-consuming software development is.
A software solution that’s caught our eye goes under the unlikely name of DASYLab. Originally developed in Germany, DASYLab, unlike graphical programming tools, lets you build an application through a simple point-and-click interface. It presents you with a palette of modules that include everything from triggers and averages right through to FFT. You just select the hardware, the signal processing and the display and connect them together on-screen.
So instead of thinking about function calls and the like, you think in terms of the job you need to do. Connect an analogue input module to a chart recorder module and you have a continuous live data feed from your transducers on your screen. Add a 'Write Data' module and all that data is logged to disk. You stay focused on the test or monitoring job you need to get done and don’t have to spend time learning a programming language.
What we really like about DASYLab is that it brings back control to the design engineer. Organisations that use graphical programming languages typically invest in training up one individual on the team. That person creates the programs that all the engineers use, and managing his or her programming tasks becomes critical to the performance of the whole team.
In contrast, each individual R&D or test engineer can configure and use DASYLab, in exactly the way that suits them. If you’ve got a task that needs doing today, you can configure it in minutes and use it immediately, rather than taking days to write and test a program.
Dr Know's recommended download is the DASYLab trial version - download yours today.