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Why should anyone in Louisiana want to know how hot the coffee is in Hertfordshire?
Well, though communications aren't yet advanced enough to pipe hot drinks
halfway across the world, an experiment at the ISA (Instrument Society of
America) exhibition in New Orleans (2-6 October 1995) showed how easy it is for
real-time data to be shared across the Internet.
So while Fred Putnam and his team from Laboratory Technologies Corporation
(LABTECH) were meeting and greeting delegates in New Orleans, the kitchen at UK
distributor Adept Scientific plc in Letchworth, Herts, was wired up to send
live data via the Net to the LABTECH display booth.
The occasion was the first public announcement of LABTECHNet, a remarkable new
development by the makers of LABTECH NOTEBOOK, the world's best-known
personal computer software for data acquisition and control. LABTECHNet
makes it possible to monitor any number of remote data acquisition sites
simultaneously, over local area networks, ordinary phone lines or the
Internet - in other words real-time computing over worldwide networks. Now
wherever you are in the world, you can check the current temperature of your
coffee back home - or access rather more useful data relating to your
manufacturing process, research project, stock movement or sales progress.
What is so different about LABTECHNet is that it allows single data points to be
transferred over a network, rather than having to move a complete document,
file or screen. So in the trial example we've just mentioned, a Strawberry Tree
DATAshuttle input/output module was linked up to Adept's coffee machine to
track continuously the temperature of the coffee and transmit it via
LABTECHNet over the Internet.
Thirsty delegates in New Orleans could see displayed on screen just how hot the
coffee was in Letchworth at that exact moment - data transfer took only a
fraction of a second.
With tens of thousands of users worldwide, LABTECH NOTEBOOK provides a
flexible graphical tool for handling the flow of data within an industrial or
laboratory environment. Users choose from a wide array of drag-and-drop
iconic building blocks to design their set-up. On-screen gauges, meters,
switches and graphs provide an animated display of the data acquisition or
control system, while the software can simultaneously stream data to disk and
perform real-time manipulation of data. Multi-graph displays, hotspots to
navigate between views and support for Windows sound .WAV files, so that alarms
or messages can be assigned readily understood audio clips, are among the
enhancements to the most recent version 8.1 of LABTECH NOTEBOOK.
Strawberry Tree's DATAshuttle is a small but powerful data acquisition unit
that provides 8 analogue inputs and 8 digital input/output lines. A convenient
alternative to an internal board plus external terminal panel, DATAshuttle
provides a neat, easy-to-configure solution for PC data acquisition,
plugging directly into a desktop or laptop PC's parallel port and taking inputs
directly from sensors.
LABTECHNet, LABTECH NOTEBOOK version 8.1 and the Strawberry Tree DATAshuttle
are available now from Adept Scientific, 6 Business Centre West, Avenue One,
Letchworth, Herts. SG6 2HB; telephone 01462 480055, fax 01462 480213.
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