Data Acquisition - Product Reviews

Generally data acquisition means to acquire data.board in the master-slave configuration through an
However, in computer terminology, datainterconnect port. It has six selectable signals
acquisition is defined as the process of uniting realranging from 200 million volts to a maximum of
world data to produce the data to be3.2 volts.
maneuvered by the computer system. The dataOME-PCI-1002 series: This data acquisition board is
is in the form of waveforms or signals. Thesemade by Omega. It features 12 bits 110 KHz
signals are obtained using different instrumentsanalog to digital converter PCI board. The PCI
and devices. The data acquired can be stored onboard provides 32 single ended or 16 differential
the computer using vendor supplied software andinputs along with 16 digital input and 16 digital
the control can be made with the use ofoutput channels. This PCI board series provide
programming languages like Basic, Pascal,sampling rate of 110 KS/s. However, it may vary
FORTRAN, C etc.within the series depending on whether the
Data acquisition systems, as the name suggestschannels are single or multiple. Unlike many other
are products or systems used to gather data orcompany boards, the omega OME-PCI-1002
information from certain source. The datacomes with software development kit compatible
acquisition systems are distinguished on followingwith Windows 98/NT/2000/XP. This software
basis: serial communication, USB, parallel ports anddevelopment kit includes DLL files for high level
plug-in boards.programming languages and OCX files for Active
Without going much in depth, below are the detailsX programming.iOTech DaqBoard-3000 series: This
of different data acquisition boards.is a multifunction data acquisition board embedded
Signatec PDA1000: This is the data acquisitionwith four 1 MHz PCI boards. Unlike OME-PCI-1002
product made by Signatec. The PDA100 is aboard, this board has 16 single-ended or 8
64-bit data acquisition board compatible with PCIdifferential analog inputs with the option to expand
device equipments. The "Plug and Play" feature isthem up to 64 single-ended or 32 differential
standard in all PCI devices. The analog bandwidthanalog inputs. DaqBoard-3000 series has 24
of DC to 500 MHz and digitization rate of up to 1high-speed digital I/O lines. There are four 32 bit
MHz makes it remarkably unique in its class. Thecounter input channels with quadrature encoder
bus that it uses is a Signatec Auxiliary Bus (SAB).capability. It supports multiple DMA channels and
This bus can allow data of 500 MB to beUSB version of this board is also available in
transferred per second. Multiple PDA1000 boardsmarket.
can be connected to the same PDA1000 DAQ