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Category Archives: Data Acquisition

Data Acquisition products and software and how to use them.

How To Eliminate Noise in Data Logger and Data Acquisition Measurements (Part 3 of 6)

Data Acquisition > Products or Data Logger > Products (Note: A consolidated version of this topic that contains all six part can be found here) Effects of Common Mode Voltage Frequency We’ve covered evaluating noise magnitude to see if noise elimination is worth the time and effort, and a procedure to test the instrument for Read More

How To Eliminate Noise in Data Logger and Data Acquisition Measurements (Part 2 of 6)

Data Acquisition > Products or Data Logger > Products (Note: A consolidated version of this topic that contains all six part can be found here) Common Mode Voltages and Isolated Instruments In the premier edition of this series I talked about how you should initially approach noise elimination. The first step is to ensure that Read More

How To Eliminate Noise in Data Logger and Data Acquisition Measurements (Part 1 of 6)

Data Acquisition > Products or Data Logger > Products (Note: A consolidated version of this topic that contains all six part can be found here) This happens almost daily: A customer contacts our support group to complain of noise on his measurement. Almost invariably a comparison is made between the output of his PC-based product Read More

Calibrating to Display Engineering Units

Data Acquisition > Software > WinDaq As explained a few blog posts ago, PC based data acquisition is the process by which electrical signals (from sensors) are fed into electronic instruments, digitized and stored on a PC hard drive. To be of any real use however, these signals must be converted into meaningful engineering units Read More

Breaking Down Lengthy Recordings

Data Acquisition > Software > WinDaq When acquiring data, in most circumstances, it’s more practical to record several smaller files as opposed to one very large file. Perhaps you want to record continuously, until an event occurs, without filling up your hard drive with useless information? WinDaq data acquisition software includes tools to automate these Read More

Context-sensitive Help

Data Acquisition > Software > WinDaq Have you tried lately to access the help file for a fairly complex application? There’s a lot of information in there and digging through it to find the one nugget necessary for the task at hand can be time consuming. That’s why, a very long time ago, the Wizards Read More

How To Put Signal Noise Into Perspective

Data Acquisition > Software > WinDaq A customer contacted our support group the other day to complain about noise on his load cell signal and asking for the best way to remove it. We’ve seen this movie before and asked for a sample in the form of a recorded WinDaq data file so we could Read More

Hooking COM Ports: Terminal Emulators

Data Acquisition > USB In my previous post about hooking COM ports I described how it’s achieved and why a manufacturer might want to do it. I hinted that a particular advantage of an instrument that hooks a COM port is to allow simple communication using a terminal emulator. Briefly, a terminal emulator is software Read More

Minimize Data Loss in the Event of a Crash or Power Failure

In the world of PC based data acquisition, data loss is always a concern. Despite precautions, hard drives crash and power failures happen. However, there are some simple steps that you can take to minimize data loss. In locations where power outages are common, you might consider an uninterruptible power supply (UPS). Make sure that Read More

Hooking COM Ports

This post isn’t about angling for fish called Com Ports, nor is it about any kind of lurid Com Port activity. It’s about how some contemporary USB-based instruments use a traditional device at the software level to provide a lot of programming flexibility. Plain and simple, the phrase COM port refers to a serial port Read More