A New Paradigm for Data Acquisition

Like many design engineers and makers versed in open source, I wanted a development board that would allow me to eliminate the compromises in my designs due to manufacturer propriety hardware and software. I was never really happy with the number of channel offerings, firmware limitations, physical size, and costs per channel of commercially available data acquisition products currently on the market today. I was also not satisfied with other simplistic project platforms like the Ardruino and IOIO for use on projects like hexapods, quadcopters and other complex robotic systems that need parallel processes, vice linear processes. There had to be a better way and a better development board that could also be open source. So in 2013, I developed an entirely new data acquisition module and prototyping paradigm that I call AndroiDAQ.

LabVIEW How-to, with the AndroiDAQ Data Acquisition Module

The AndroiDAQ module was designed as an easy to use and complete data acquisition module for multiple platforms. Not only can it be used with the Android operating system, but it can also be easily used with National Instrument’s LabVIEW, as well as JAVA, Python, and other programming languages. To demonstrate this, Controlled Capture Systems offers a complete data acquisition suite for AndroiDAQ and LabVIEW called AndroiDAQ DEMO for LabVIEW. The term DEMO is short for Dream, Engineer, Make, and Operate. The open source nature of DEMO allows users of LabVIEW to open and view the LabVIEW source wiring diagrams to understand the functions of how to control the AndroiDAQ module under USB, Wi-Fi, or Bluetooth to measure the 8-channels of its analog to digital converter (ADC), or control, as inputs or outputs, the 16-channels of digital IO. The wiring diagrams also show you how to read and/or clear or set the built-in AndroiDAQ micro-SD card and AndroiDAQ’s real-time clock. This article is going to explain several of the sub-VIs (or sub-virtual instruments, which are what LabVIEW methods or functions are called) of the DEMO for LabVIEW application, so that you can apply these sub-VIs to your own custom application with the AndroiDAQ module.

Controlled Capture Systems

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