Abstract
This paper presents a low-cost microcontroller-based data acquisition device. The key component of the presented solution is a configurable microcontroller-based device with an integrated USB transceiver and a 12-bit analogue-to-digital converter (ADC). The presented embedded DAQ device contains a preloaded program (firmware) that enables easy acquisition and generation of analogue and digital signals and data transfer between the device and the application running on a PC via USB bus. This device has been developed as a USB human interface device (HID). This USB class is natively supported by most of the operating systems and therefore any installation of additional USB drivers is unnecessary. The input/output peripheral of the presented device is not static but rather flexible, and could be easily configured to customised needs without changing the firmware. When using the developed configuration utility, a majority of chip pins can be configured as analogue input, digital input/output, PWM output or one of the SPI lines. In addition, LabVIEW drivers have been developed for this device. When using the developed drivers, data acquisition and signal processing algorithms as well as graphical user interface (GUI), can easily be developed using a well-known, industry proven, block oriented LabVIEW programming environment.
Highlights
Data acquisition (DAQ) is the process of measuring an electrical or physical phenomenon using a computer
This signal is further converted into digital numeric values by DAQ hardware, which is controlled by a software program developed using various general purpose programming languages (C, LabVIEW, Visual Basic, MATLAB)
The SimpleDAQ software includes the following parts: (1) the firmware that is deployed on the microcontroller, (2) SimpleDAQ configuration utility that enables customisation of microcontroller’s peripheral to the customised needs, and (3) a LabVIEW driver that enables easy creation of data acquisition/generation, data analysis, and data storage algorithms using a LabVIEW development environment
Summary
Data acquisition (DAQ) is the process of measuring an electrical or physical phenomenon using a computer. A USB data acquisition system for humidity and temperature measurements is presented in [6] This DAQ device is based on PIC18F4550 and enables acquisition of 8 analogue inputs with 10-bit resolution. In [12] the same authors presented a modified solution for an indoor environmental monitoring system that is based on the IEEE 1451 standard In both cases, the developed device was based on PIC18F4550, whilst the communication and the GUI were realised using LabVIEW. In [13] a microcontroller based data acquisition system is presented for slowly varying signals This DAQ is based on PIC12F675 and enables acquisition of four analogue inputs with 10-bit resolution. The SimpleDAQ contains a preloaded program (firmware) that enables easy acquisition and the generation of analogue, digital signals, and data transfer between the device and the application running on a PC via USB.
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