From the course: Data Acquisition with LabVIEW

What is data acquisition? - LabVIEW Tutorial

From the course: Data Acquisition with LabVIEW

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What is data acquisition?

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- [Instructor] Data acquisition, or DAQ for short is the process of measuring and converting physical conditions like temperature or pressure into discrete digital values. We're bringing real world signals into a computer to store and process them digitally. There are three main parts that make up a DAQ System. First, is a sensor or transducer, which is the device that converts some sort of physical phenomenon into an electrical signal. That could be a thermocouple to measure temperature or a microphone to capture sound. That electrical signal is then sent to a DAQ device, which is responsible for measuring it. The DAQ hardware does two things. First, that raw signal coming from the sensor might be too noisy or too small to measure directly, so a signal conditioning circuit cleans it up or manipulates it into something usable. That might involve amplifying, filtering or isolating the input signal. After that, the DAQ device uses a component called an analog to digital converter to produce a digital sequence of numbers to represent that analog signal. That digital information gets sent to a computer, which is running driver software to interface with the DAQ device, and application software to process the data. For most of this course we'll be using a National Instruments multi-function DAQ device, which communicates using the NI DAQmx Driver software. The DAQmx application programming interface supports several text based languages, including C, C++, Python, and .NET languages like VB.NET and C#, but for this course we'll be strictly using LabVIEW. If you have your own DAQ hardware to use while taking this course, that's great. But if not, don't worry. I'll show you how to simulate a virtual device so you can still follow along with the programming. Near the end of this course we'll swap out the National Instruments DAQ device for a third party oscilloscope, which we'll interface with using a different driver called NI-VISA. So from a software perspective to follow along with the examples in this course, you'll need a copy of LabVIEW. I'll be using LabVIEW 2019. The DAQmx driver. And the NI-VISA driver. These components can be downloaded and installed separately, but most of the time people choose to install LabVIEW and the drivers together.

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