Design of Low Cost Multi Channel Data Acquisition System for Meteorological Application

Abstract

The primary objective of the present work is to design a low cost multichannel data acquisition system which can be used for meteorological application. The proposed multi channel data acquisition system acquires ambient temperature, barometric pressure, altitude, hu- midity and light intensity data from environment and stores the data for future use. The sensors are connected with a low cost microcontroller (ATmega328) unit which performs the data acquisition and data logging operation. A real time clock is used to keep current time with the measurement. Different communication interfaces such as serial communication, wireless communication and ethernet communication are used in the data acquisition system. In serial communication, the sensor data are logged in COM port of PC. LabVIEW based application is developed which provides graphical user interface for the user. VISA protocol is used to communicate the COM port data with LabVIEW. Other communication protocol such as wireless communication and ethernet communication protocol is used to transmit the sensor data over a communication channel. In ethernet communication, the data is uploaded in ethernet which can be viewed using a web browser. In wireless communication Xbee transmitter and Xbee receiver modules are used to transmit data over a longer distance. The salient features of this developed system is that the system is low cost, uses open source softwares like arduino and python and the system is economical (i.e INR 6500). This developed system performs satisfactorily under different condition. The system is tested for 24 hour in April 2015 and provides satisfactory results.