Article: Data acquisition gear steps up

The foolproof plug-in-and-go approach to PC data acquisition pioneered by the DataShuttle series of products is now available to high-speed applications too. NIGEL TREVARTHEN reports.

Over the past few years, one innovative product has opened up PC-based data acquisition to thousands of users worldwide. That product, DataShuttle, has introduced many people to the concept of plug-and-play data acquisition: connect your sensors to the DataShuttle, your DataShuttle to a PC port, and you’re ready to start taking measurements.

Now comes the biggest advance ever in the history of this product. Whilst the existing products are ideal for the wide range of applications which involve tens or hundreds of readings a second, the new DataShuttle/2000 offers 200kHz analogue sampling. In addition, it can synchronously measure analogue inputs, frequency inputs, and digital inputs!

In another major development, the 16-bit/200kHz DataShuttle/2000 comes equipped with I/O capability which can be expanded and enhanced with over forty expansion and signal conditioning options through plug-in boards. These expansion channels can handle the same 200kHz rate of the built-in channels.
The new DataShuttle/2000 is available with either a built-in Ethernet interface (model /2000E), or a parallel-port interface (models /2000A or /2000X).

The DataShuttle/2000E can attach directly to the Ethernet port of a PC, or to an installed Ethernet network. It contains three parallel expansion ports, which can attach to an additional three parallel DataShuttle units, thereby quadrupling the channel capacity of a single Ethernet link to the PC!

The DataShuttle/2000A and DataShuttle/ 2000X attach directly to the parallel port on a PC, or to a PC-Card slot, a PCI slot, an ISA slot or a parallel expansion port on a DataShuttle/2000E. The /2000X includes three expansion card slots.

The DataShuttle/2000 has a rugged metal housing, with a similar footprint to a notebook PC. It can be powered from an AC power adaptor, or by any 9 to 30 VDC supply, such as a car battery.

The expandability options mean that the built-in 8 differential, 16 single-ended analogue inputs can be expanded up to 256 analogue input channels, to handle measurements such as thermocouples, strain gauges, accelerometers and many more. Every analogue, digital and counter input channel is measured in 5µs.

The onboard 40 digital I/O channels can also be expanded, up to 272, including TTL level, isolated and relay closure. Digital inputs, either on the DataShuttle/2000, or on expansion options, can be scanned in 16-bit increments along with analogue inputs, providing digital data that is time-correlated to acquired analogue data (5µs per 16 bit input). The four frequency and pulse-counting inputs on the DataShuttle/ 2000 can also be scanned synchronously with the analogue and digital inputs. As an option, the DataShuttle/2000 has four 16-bit, 100-kHz analogue outputs, which install internally.

Drivers and programming tools for nearly every programming environment under Windows are also provided, including Visual Basic, C++, Delphi, LabVIEW, and DASYLab. DaqView software, for “Out-of-the-Box” setup, acquisition, display and analysis of acquired data is included. Post-acquisition analysis is achieved via included eZ-PostView software.

All this and the free support for which the Adept Scientific data acquisition team has become so well-known are available at an extremely competitive price too. Well worth investigating.