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Sometimes the best developments are the simplest. ComputerBoards' DAS-Wizard, an add-in for Excel which enables data to be logged in directly to a spreadsheet, is one such example. It's exactly what so many of our data acquisition customers have been after!
We've lost count of the number of people over the years who are analysing their acquired data in an Excel spreadsheet. It's not normally a problem to import an ascii data file into Excel, but what we've all really wanted is the ability to get the data in directly, using Excel as a front end to start and stop the data acquisition. Now, with its new low-cost DAS-Wizard utility, ComputerBoards has produced exactly what we want.
DAS-Wizard is an add-in for Excel which puts a new tool on the menu bar. This brings up an elegant dialogue box with just four tabs: one to set up the board, another to set up the worksheet, a third to set up and control the data scan, and a fourth to set up internal and external triggers. In fact, setting up the software is even easier than setting up the board in the first place.
Data can be written to the worksheet in columns or rows, and can be expressed as A/D converter counts, voltage or temperature. The sample rate may be internally or externally clocked. If you want to see the data as it is added to the worksheet, that's possible too. Perhaps the only limitations are those of Excel itself: if you're doing continuous high speed acquisition, or you want to graphically analyse your data using more sophisticated methods such as zooming in, live historical trending or direct cursor readoff of values, then professional data acquisition software such as DASYLab would be needed. But for easy viewing and display, especially if you're proficient with Excel, DAS-Wizard could be exactly what you need.
Mick Halnan |
