Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!watmath!uunet!bionet!cpc865.east-anglia.ac.uk!A031 From: A031@cpc865.east-anglia.ac.uk Newsgroups: bionet.molbio.news Subject: (none) Message-ID: <8908021414.AA14843@net.bio.net> Date: 2 Aug 89 14:34:10 GMT Sender: daemon@NET.BIO.NET Lines: 44 The data acquisition problem for the IBM PC is not trivial even though there are a number of A to D cards are available for the PC. Our experience with numerous samples of the cheap and fast PC-39A A to D card from Amplicon has shown there to be hardware bugs on the card which manifest as extreme sensitivity to grounding of ALL unused connector pins and unreliable dma data acquisition. This may have been cured by now. Cost is in the region of #450. There are more reliable cards available, including the Data Translation range which is well regarded. The speed you require may be a problem though as the fastest continuous acquisition available is 27.5k samples per second for the high speed model: the DT2801-A. The samples may be gathered from a maximum of 16 single-ended channels or 8 differential input channels. If 6 channels are required then the maximum speed available is 4.5 k samples per second and hence a bandwidth of approx 2 kHz/chan with appropriate anti-aliasing filters. The samples are quantized to 12 bits and the card also has software programmable gain, but very low level signals will require pre-amplification. Cost is in the region of #1000. Once you have purchased a card you will need to buy or write some software to 'drive' the hardware and save the samples onto a hard disk, and more to process the data offline. If you require continuous data acquisition and storage to disk as well as 'scope or chart recorder style multi-channel graphics display running in real-time using dma or interrupts, with the ability to replay at full or reduced speed with a hierarchical pop-open menu-driven user interface which is a doddle to master etc... then you are not going to have much time for research if you write it yourselves. Fortunately the new Biosoft SoftOscilloscope is now available for the PC for #200 which gives you all this and more besides. The data gathered can be processed either by a program of your own making, or by one of the new generation of mathematics programs available for the PC such as MathSoft's MathCAD. Amplicon are on (0273) 570220 Data Translation are in the States on 617 481-3700 BioSoft are on (0223) 68622 MathSoft are in the States on 617 557-1017 I hope this helps anyone trying to acquire data from the real world on the IBM PC/XT/AT & PS/2 A Cunningham-Smith University of East Anglia, Norwich.