Software and Hardware

Software

There is off the shelf commercial software for data acquistion, process control, and data analysis. Two of the best known are DataStudio from Pasco and LabQuest from Vernier. However these excellent software products are not a good match to our requirements, largely because many of the details are hidden "under the hood" and not easily accessible to us or our students. Therefore, with some reluctance, we are developing our own software. Our software is based on LabVIEW and SignalExpress; both of these are from National Instruments. In this section we provide access to the software that we have been developing.

At present, each LabVIEW program is "stand alone" and the zip file includes all necessary SubVI's. As we learn more about which SubVI's are required by a substantial number of programs, it is likely that we will begin building common libraries.

The main VI is configured to:

This makes the VI easy for our students to use, but impossible to edit unless one stops the program with the Abort button instead of the Stop button on the front panel.

All software is Copyright © 2007 - 2009 The University of Toronto Physics Practicals. The software is open source and licensed under a Creative Commons Licence.

Creative Commons License

 

Hardware

Originally we intended to use commercial data acquisition (DAQ) hardware, such as Science Workshop from Pasco. However we found that there were performance issues in using these DAQs with our LabVIEW and SignalExpress software. So, again with some reluctance, we have designed our own DAQ, based on a National Instruments USB -6251 OEM board.

Among the features of our Data Acquistion Device are:

  • A clear plastic case with blue indicator lights.
  • Digital and analog inputs and outputs.
  • USB connection to the computers
  • 1.2 M samples/second.

Our device costs about $1200, which is only a bit more than the Science Workshop device from Pasco. It is in principle about 5 times faster than the Pasco device, although in practice because of the issue of drivers for LabVIEW it compares even more favorably to the Science Workshop box.

The inputs and outputs are compatible with sensors from a large number of vendors, including force sensors and motion detectors from Pasco.

The principle developer of the U of T Data Acquisition Device was Larry Avramidis of the Department of Physics. The device was a finalist for the Graphical System Design Achievement Award by National Instruments in 2008.

Last revision of this page: $Date: 2009/08/15 14:04:44 $ (y/m/d UTC)