International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 22-25, 1984 / Riviera Hotel, Las Vegas, Nevada / The requirements for data acquisition systems grow rapidly with the progress of technology. Increasingly complex test instruments become available. Integration of instruments and computers into an operational measurement system, however, is more difficult and expensive as requirements increase. A family of instruments was developed which can perform complex measurement tasks without a large integration effort since it provides a large number of compatible hardware and software modules for conditioning and conversion of signals into digital form, for data storage, data transmission, and data pre-processing.

International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 30-November 02, 1995 / Riviera Hotel, Las Vegas, Nevada / The Department of Defense (DoD), through a Tri-Service Program Office, is developing the Common Airborne Instrumentation System (CAIS) to promote standardization, commonality, and interoperability among aircraft test instrumentation systems. The advent of CAIS will change how the DoD test community conducts business. The CAIS program will allow aircraft test and evaluation facilities to utilize common airborne systems, ground support equipment, and technical knowledge for airborne instrumentation systems. During the development of the CAIS, the Program Office will conduct a broad spectrum of tests: engineering design, acceptance, environmental qualification, system demonstration, and flight qualification. Each of these tests addresses specific aspects of the overall functional requirements and specifications. The use of test matrices enables the program office to insure each specific test covers the optimum requirements, and the combination of all testing efforts addresses the total system functional requirements.

No description available.

International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 21, 2002 / Town & Country Hotel and Conference Center, San Diego, California / Because modern data acquisition systems use digital backplanes, it is logical for more and more data processing to be done in each Data Acquisition Unit (DAU) or even in each module. The processing related to an analog acquisition module typically takes the form of digital signal conditioning for range adjust, linearization and filtering. Some of the advantages of this are discussed in this paper. The next stage is powerful processing boards within DAUs for data reduction and third-party algorithm development. Once data is being written to and from powerful processing modules an obvious next step is networking and decom-less access to data. This paper discusses some of the issues related to these types of processing.

International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 23-26, 2000 / Town & Country Hotel and Conference Center, San Diego, California / Selecting an airborne data acquisition system involves compromises. No single data acquisition system can be at the same time, lowest cost, smallest, easiest to use and most accurate. The only way to come to a reasonable decision is to carefully plan the project, taking into account what measurements will be required, what are the physical environments involved, what personnel and resources will be needed and of course, how much money is available in the budget? Getting the right mix of equipment, resources and people to do the job within the schedule and the budget is going to involve a number of tradeoffs. A good plan and a thorough knowledge of available resources and equipment will allow you make the necessary decisions. Hopefully, this paper will offer some suggestions that will aid in preparing your plan and give some insight into available system alternatives.

International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 28-31, 1996 / Town and Country Hotel and Convention Center, San Diego, California / The traditional use of active RC-type filters to provide anti-aliasing filters in Pulse Code Modulation (PCM) systems is being replaced by the use of Digital Signal Processing (DSP). This is especially true when performance requirements are stringent and require operation over a wide environmental temperature range. This paper describes the design of a multi channel digital filtering card that incorporates up to 100 unique digitally implemented cutoff frequencies. Any combination of these frequencies can be independently assigned to any of the input channels.

International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 22-25, 2001 / Riviera Hotel and Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada / Boeing Commercial Airplanes has used many methods in the past to measure the structural loads on the wings of its airplanes. The most recent approach is to use arrays of MEMS pressure sensors on the top and bottom surfaces of the wings. By knowing the difference in pressure between the top and bottom of the wings the structural loads on the wings can be calculated. It was decided that in order to build an array of 1100 sensors it would be necessary to condition the sensors and convert the analog output to a digital form at the site of the pressure measurement. This process was taken one step further by converting the output of the A/D converter into engineering units within the sensor module as well. The array is built using a flex circuit card in one foot sections that can be interconnected to form an array of up to 125 sensors. There is a sensor location every two inches on the flex circuit but not all locations are populated. This paper will describe not only the pressure belt but the lessons learned during the development and the implications that these lessons have for smart transducers in general.

No description available.

International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 30-November 02, 1995 / Riviera Hotel, Las Vegas, Nevada / The need for precise gain and phase matching in multi-channel data sampling systems can result in very strict design requirements for presample or anti-aliasing filters. The traditional use of active RC-type filters is expensive, especially when performance requirements are tight and when operation over a wide environmental temperature range is required. New Digital Signal Processing (DSP) techniques have provided an opportunity for cost reduction and/or performance improvements in these types of applications. This paper summarizes the results of an evaluation of various digital filter types used as matched presample filters in data sampling systems.

Industrial systems often require the acquisition of real-world analog signals for several applications. Various physical phenomena such as displacement, pressure, temperature, light intensity, etc. are measured by sensors, which is a type of transducer, and then converted into a corresponding electrical signal. The electrical signal obtained from the sensor, usually a few tens mV in magnitude, is subsequently conditioned by means of amplification, filtering, range matching, isolation etc., so that the signal can be rendered for further processing and data extraction. This thesis presents the design and implementation of a general purpose op amp used to condition a reflective object sensor’s output. The op amp is used in a non-inverting configuration, as a current-to-voltage converter to transform a phototransistor current into a usable voltage. The op amp has been implemented using CMOS architecture and fabricated in AMI 0.5-µm CMOS process available through MOSIS. The thesis begins with an overview of the various circuits involving op amps used in signal conditioning circuits. Owing to the vast number of applications for sensor signal conditioning circuits, a brief discussion of an industrial sensor circuit is also illustrated. This is followed by the complete design of the op amp and its implementation in the data acquisition circuit. The op amp is then characterized using simulation results. Finally, the test setup and the measurement results are presented. The thesis concludes with an overview of some possible future work on the sensor-op amp data acquisition circuit.