ITC/USA 2009 Conference Proceedings / The Forty-Fifth Annual International Telemetering Conference and Technical Exhibition / October 26-29, 2009 / Riviera Hotel & Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada / In principle, the requirements for a flight test data acquisition system for space testing (launch vehicles, orbiters, satellites and International Space Station (ISS) installations) are very similar to those for more earth-bound applications. In practice, there are important environmental and operational differences that present challenges for both users and vendors of flight test equipment. Environmental issues include the severe vibration and shock experienced on take-off, followed by a very sharp thermal shock, culminating (for orbital vehicles) in a low temperature, low pressure, high radiation operating environment. Operational issues can include the need to dynamically adapt to changing configurations (for example when an instrumented stage is released) and the difficulty in Telemetering data during the initial launch stage from a vehicle that may not be recoverable, and therefore does not offer the option of an on-board recorder. Addressing these challenges requires simple, rugged and flexible solutions. Traditionally these solutions have been bespoke, specifically designed equipment. In an increasingly cost-conscious environment engineers are now looking to commercial off-the-shelf solutions. This paper discusses these solutions and highlights the issues that instrumentation engineers need to consider when designing or selecting flight test equipment.

A new versatile computer controlled electrochemlcal/ESR data acquisition system has been developed for the Investigation of short-lived radicals with life-times of 20 milliseconds and greater, Different computer programs have been developed to monitor the decay of radicals; over hours or minutes, seconds or milliseconds. Signal averaging and Fourier smoothing is employed in order to improve the signal to noise ratio. Two microcomputers are used to control the system, one home-made computer containing the M6800 chip which controls the magnetic field, and an IBM PC XT which controls the electrochemistry and the data acquisition. The computer programs are written in Fortran and C, and call machine language subroutines, The system functions by having the radical generated by an electrochemical pulse: after or during the pulse the ESR data are collected. Decaying radicals which have half-lives of seconds or greater have their spectra collected in the magnetic field domain, which can be swept as fast as 200 Gauss per second. The decay of the radicals in the millisecond region is monitored by time-resolved ESR: a technique in which data is collected in both the time domain and in the magnetic field domain. Previously, time-resolved ESR has been used (without field modulation) to investigate ultra-short-lived species with life-times in the region of only a few microseconds. The application of the data acquisition system to chemical systems is illustrated. This is the first time a computer controlled system whereby the radical is generated by electrochemical means and subsequently the ESR data collected, has been developed.

The report is focused on the implementation of a data acquisition system that will be used for measuring different parameters which are needed in solar panel behavior analysis. To accomplish the DAQ system a DAQ board has been designed and implemented. This DAQ board acquires measured climatic parameters that affect the PV module behavior and voltage and current of a PV module. The DAQ board may take measurements of multiple analog and digital signals that come from various sensors including solar radiation, temperature, wind sensors and other measurement devices. The DAQ board may also output analog signals for controlling other devices. The DAQ board is the basic part of the DAQ system and several of them can be connected via a single communication bus (RS485). A unique slave ID can be assigned to each DAQ board on the communication bus, which allows the control of all boards via a GUI application installed on a master computer. Therefore, the DAQ system can be used for monitoring a PV module installation as well as logging the measured data in a data storage server. This report outlines the details of the DAQ system design which are helpful in utilizing or upgrading this system. These details also include programming of DAQ board and implementation of MODBUS communication protocol within the DAQ system.

International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 20-23, 2003 / Riviera Hotel and Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada / There is growing interest in the airborne instrumentation community to adopt commercial standards to obtain scalable data rates, standards based interoperability, and utilization of Commercial Off The Shelf (COTS) products to reduce system costs. However, there has been few such data acquisition systems developed to date. L-3 Telemetry East has developed a prototype called the Network Data Acquisition System (NetDAS), which is based on the 10/100 Base-T Ethernet standard, TCP/UDP/IP network protocols and an industrial Ethernet switch. NetDAS has added network capability to the legacy MPC-800 telemetry system by replacing the existing formatter module with a formatter/controller based on a COTS CPU module and a custom designed bridge module. NetDAS has demonstrated transmission bit rates as high as 20 Mbps from a single unit using UDP/IP and an Ethernet switch. The NetDAS system has also demonstrated scalable and distributed architecture.

ITC/USA 2008 Conference Proceedings / The Forty-Fourth Annual International Telemetering Conference and Technical Exhibition / October 27-30, 2008 / Town and Country Resort & Convention Center, San Diego, California / In this paper we describe extensions to the Instrument Hardware Abstraction Language (IHAL). Since IHAL was first presented to ITC in 2006, a number of improvements were made to the design of IHAL. Major changes to the schema include splitting it into multiple XML Schema (XSD) files, separation of the description of instrumentation functions from the description of the hardware, and addition of a function pool.

International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 20-23, 2003 / Riviera Hotel and Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada / The 746th Test Squadron at Holloman AFB has developed and utilized the Central Inertial Guidance Test Facility (CIGTF) High Accuracy Post-processing Reference System (CHAPS). CHAPS is a multi-sensor navigation reference system used to evaluate position, velocity, and attitude performance of Global Positioning System (GPS), Inertial Navigation System (INS), and Embedded GPS/INS (EGI) navigation systems on large vehicles and aircraft. Reference data is processed post-test with accuracy ranges from a meter to sub-meter depending on the reference configuration and test environment (profile, trajectory dynamics, GPS jamming, etc.). The GPS Aided Inertial Navigation Reference (GAINR) system developed by the Air Force Flight Test Center (Edwards AFB) offered other utilization capabilities (test beds and post-processing time). The basic sensor assembly is an EGI navigation system. The data are post-processed with Multisensor Optimal Smoothing Estimation Software (MOSES). Incorporating CHAPS and GAINR capabilities generates a reference system with enhanced accuracy (sub-meter) in a dynamic GPS non-jamming/jamming environment. This paper will present the enhanced reference system combination of CHAPS/GAINR capabilities, characterization process and development methodology.

International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 25-28, 1999 / Riviera Hotel and Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada / The space shuttle has been flying for seventeen years and NASA plans to fly it for many more. To meet the requirement of supporting future flights, NASA has undertaken a Shuttle Upgrades Program to improve various shuttle components. The avionics on the solid rocket booster (SRB) is one of the areas being upgraded. To develop avionics hardware, the environments that they are to encounter during flight must be defined to a higher degree of fidelity than is currently available. This paper describes the effort to determine these environments via the use of a commercial off the shelf data acquisition system.

International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 26-29, 1992 / Town and Country Hotel and Convention Center, San Diego, California / The MicroDAS-1000 is an airborne Data Acquisition System (DAS) designed to meet the growing needs of airframe manufacturers for extensive test data accumulation, processing and evaluation. As such, the system has been designed with emphasis on modularity, miniaturization and ease of operator usage and expansion. The MicroDAS product line includes a series of components used as building blocks to configure systems of virtually any size. The modular design of these components allows considerable latitude to the instrumentation engineer in configuring systems for simple or complex applications. The modular concept has been extended to the design of plug-in modules for different functional requirements and system applications. All units are under software control to allow rapid reconfiguration and setup as requirements for instrumentation and data gathering change.

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