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 / Configuring a modern, high-performance data acquisition system is typically a very timeconsuming and complex process. Any enhancement to the data acquisition setup software that can reduce the amount of time needed to configure the system is extremely useful. Automatic format generation is one of the most useful enhancements to a data acquisition setup application. By using Automatic Format Generation, an instrumentation engineer can significantly reduce the amount of time that is spent configuring the system while simultaneously gaining much greater flexibility in creating sampling formats. This paper discusses several techniques that can be used to generate sampling formats automatically while making highly efficient use of the system's bandwidth. This allows the user to obtain most of the benefits of a hand-tuned, manually created format without spending excessive time creating it. One of the primary techniques that this paper discusses is an enhancement to the commonly used power-of-two rule, for selecting sampling rates. This allows the system to create formats that use a wider variety of rates. The system is also able to handle groups of related measurements that must follow each other sequentially in the sampling format. This paper will also cover a packet based formatting scheme that organizes measurements based on common sampling rates. Each packet contains a set of measurements that are sampled at a particular rate. A key benefit of using an automatic format generation system with this format is the optimization of sampling rates that are used to achieve the best possible match for each measurement's desired sampling rate.

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 / With the growing interest in networked data acquisition there has been a lot of focus on networked data acquisition systems. However, the requirements of a flight test instrumentation system go beyond networked DAU's. For example, a FTI network fabric has particular requirements for switches, time grandmasters, recorders, data servers and network terminals to the ground. This paper discusses these components and how they inter-operate in a single, fully networked system and discusses some FTI oriented requirements for same. Where relevant, we discuss the results of some experiments with network latencies; packet losses etc. and discuss some enhancements that can contribute to improved efficiency for flight test programs.

International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 20-23, 2003 / Riviera Hotel and Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada / The US Army Aberdeen Test Center (ATC) is acquiring, transferring, and databasing data during all phases of automotive testing using networked data acquisition devices. The devices are small ruggedized computer-based systems programmed with specific data acquisition tasks and then networked together with other devices in order to share information within a test item or vehicle. One of the devices is also networked to a ground-station for monitor, control and data transfer of any of the devices on the net. Application of these devices has varied from single vehicle tests in a single geographical location up to a 100-vehicle nationwide test. Each device has a primary task such as acquiring data from vehicular data busses (MIL-STD-1553, SAE J1708 bus, SAE J1939 bus, RS-422 serial bus, etc.), GPS (time and position), analog sensors and video with audio. Each device has programmable options, maintained in a configuration file, that define the specific recording methods, real-time algorithms to be performed, data rates, and triggering parameters. The programmability of the system and bi-directional communications allow the configuration file to be modified remotely after the system is fielded. The primary data storage media of each device is onboard solid-state flash disk; therefore, a continuous communication link is not critical to data gathering. Data are gathered, quality checked and loaded into a database for analysis. The configuration file, as an integral part of the database, ensures configuration identity and management. A web based graphical user interface provides preprogrammed query options for viewing, summarizing, graphing, and consolidating data. The database can also be queried for more detailed analyses. The architecture for this network approach to field data acquisition was under the Aberdeen Test Center program Versatile Information System Integrated On-Line (VISION). This paper will describe how the merging of data acquisition systems to network communications and information management tools provides a powerful resource for system engineers, analysts, evaluators and acquisition personnel.

ITC/USA 2006 Conference Proceedings / The Forty-Second Annual International Telemetering Conference and Technical Exhibition / October 23-26, 2006 / Town and Country Resort & Convention Center, San Diego, California / Traditional data acquisition systems have relied on physical connections between data sources and data receivers to handle the routing of acquired data streams. However, these systems grow exponentially in complexity as the number of data sources and receivers increases. New techniques are needed to address the ever increasing complexity of data acquisition. Furthermore, more advanced mechanisms are needed that move past the limitations of traditional data models that connect each data source to exactly one data receiver. This paper presents a software framework for the playback of multiplexed data acquired from a network acquisition system. This framework uses multicast technologies to connect data sources with multiple data receivers. The network acquisition system is briefly introduced before the software framework is discussed. Both the challenges and advantages involved with creating such a system are presented. Finally, this framework is applied to an aviation telemetry example.