Data acquisition using PCL-207 card

Abstract

The field of data acquisition and control encompasses a very wide range of activities. At its simplest level, it involves reading electrical signals into a computer from some form of sensor. These signals may represent the state of a physical process, such as the position and orientation of machine tools, the temperature of a furnace or the size and shape of a manufactured component. The acquired data may have to be stored, printed or displayed. Often the data have to be analyzed or processed in some way in order to generate further signals for controlling external equipment or for interfacing to other computers. This may involve manipulating only static readings, but it is also frequently necessary to deal with time-varying signals as well.
In less than a decade, the PC has become the most widely used platform for data acquisition and control. The main reasons for the popularity of PC-based technology are low costs, flexibility and ease of use, and, last but not the least, performance. Data acquisition with a PC enables one to display, log and control a wide variety of real world signals such as pressure, flow, and temperature. This ability coupled with that of easy interface with various stand-alone instruments makes the systems ever more desirable.
Until the advent of the PC, data acquisition and process monitoring were carried out by using dedicated data loggers, programmable logic controllers and or expensive proprietary computers.
In this project we have used the thermocouple(J-type) to acquire the temperature of water being heated by a heater , which we have got in mili volts range. This has been further converted approximately into the range of 5 volt by using an amplifier of suitable gain (1000). We have used the data acquisition card PCL-207 to interface the amplified output to PC.