Design Filters Interactively with DAPstudio

By DE Editors

Microstar Laboratories, Inc.(Bellevue, WA), a maker of data acquisition processor (DAP) boards andsystems, has included interactive filter design in its DAPstudiomeasurement software. That means you can build and run applicationsbased on the Signal Conditioning System (SCS) series with no other dataacquisition software required. The field-proven SCS series connectsdirectly to your sensors and to one or more specialized DAP boards(iDSC 1816 boards) in one or more PCs to give you as many channels asyou need of filtered 16-bit resolution simultaneously sampled datalogged directly to disk.

According to a press release, any off-the-shelf PC and associated diskcontrollers and drives have enough electrical and computing power toform a balanced network node with four iDSC 1816 boards and an SCS-32.A network node like this can continuously log to disk all 32 channelsof conditioned anti-aliased data at the full data acquisition rate of153.6K sps per channel, an overall rate of just under 5 million sps.

An SCS package provides direct connection to sensors, and offerssignal-conditioning services, including 4 mA at up to 28V currentsensor excitation; voltage sensor excitation of 1, 2, 5, and 10V at upto 70 mA; quarter-, half-, and full-bridge resistor networks; 120 and350 Ohm resistors standard; 10 full-scale options (10mV to 500mV);available offset ranges from between +/-0.5V to +/-5V; programmablegain with auto-calibration; programmable AC/DC coupling for ICPsensors; and two high-resolution acquisition-synchronized timingchannels per iDSC 1816.

Before a signal reaches the analog-to-digital conversion stage on aniDSC 1816 board, it passes through an analog filter on each channel toremove all frequencies above the Nyquist frequency. The subsequentdigital waveform is then free of any alias frequencies that otherwisewould corrupt the data. Price: approx. $1,000 per channel; $199(DAPstudio measurement software). For more information, or to downloadthe full version for a free trial (use it without hardware to view anybinary data files and to design filters), click here.

Sources: Press materials received from the company. Additional information gleaned from the company's website.