Data acquisition board

Microstar Laboratories has released a mid-range board, the DAP 506a/527, that includes a 233 MHz Pentium CPU and acquires 16-bit data at 500 k samples per second.

The board includes 16 analog inputs, two analog outputs, 16 digital inputs and 16 digital outputs.

External rackmounted hardware can extend these channel counts to 512, 66,128 and 1024 with 16-bit resolution on all analog inputs and outputs.

Optional software lets the user create a synchronised network of multiple DAP boards. DAPstudio, a Windows application, can be used to configure DAP boards to perform whatever low-level and real-time tasks the application requires.

DAPstudio — or other software — can be used to run a complete application from any PC on the network. Although DAPstudio allows configuring and control of any DAP without any other Windows software, it can be done from LabVIEW, Matlab and other third-party software — and from C++, VB and other applications that allow DLL calls.