Data Acquisition
Data acquisition is an important technique in many fields of research, particularly in the life sciences. There are few extant systems capable of allowing remote access to a data acquisition system by multiple investigators, especially in real time. Data acquisition is the process of extracting, transforming, and transporting data from the source systems and external data sources to the data processing system to be displayed, analyzed, and stored. A data acquisition systems (DAQ) typically consist of transducers for asserting and measuring electrical signals, signal conditioning logic to perform amplification, isolation, and filtering, and other hardware for receiving analog signals and providing them to a processing system, such as a personal computer. Data acquisition is widely used in many areas of industry. Data acquisition is used to acquire data from sensors and other sources under computer control and bring the data together and store and manipulate it.
Data acquisition is controlled by a “protocol”, which is simply a graph file that contains a series of output waveforms. It also contains instructions about which input channels to record signals from, how many episodes to acquire, etc. Data acquisition boards is the sampling of the real world to generate data that can be manipulated by a computer. Sometimes abbreviated DAQ, data acquisition typically involves acquisition of signals and waveforms and processing of the signals to obtain desired information. Data acquisition is information. The more information you have, the better you can perform your job.
Data acquisition is accomplished with the help of a computer. With the Varian Unity INOVA spectrometer a SUN workstation is used and the VNMR software runs the necessary processes. Data acquisition is made by a photon-counting detector (CP40). A VME-based computer under OS9 controls the detector and stocks the data. Data acquisition card is further complicated by the upgrades to new networking technologies that are generally prohibitively expensive or impossible for researchers to monitor. Statistics collection functionality takes resources directly away from forwarding of packets/frames, which tends to drive commercial providers toward switches from vendors that sacrifice potential research functionality in exchange for forwarding performance/throughput.
Data acquisition is the process of automatically taking measurements such as temperature, pressure, flow, humidity, geographic position, vibration, salinity or a thousand and one other parameters. The measurements may be for later analysis, for the control of a process or for simply displaying to interested personnel.