Regardless of your area of embedded design or programming expertise, you have one thing in common with every electronics designer, programmer, and engineering student across the globe: almost everything you do relates to data. Each workday, you busy yourself with acquiring data, transmitting it, repackaging it, compressing it, securing it, sharing it, storing it, analyzing it, converting it, deleting it, decoding it, quantifying it, graphing it, and more. I could go on, but I won’t. The idea is clear: manipulating and controlling data in its many forms is essential to everything you do.
The ubiquitous importance of data is what makes Circuit Cellar’s Data Acquisition issue one of the most popular each year. And since you’re always seeking innovative ways to obtain, secure, and transmit data, we consider it our duty to deliver you a wide variety of content on these topics. The September 2012 issue (Circuit Cellar 266) features both data acquisition system designs and tips relating to control and data management.
On page 18, Brian Beard explains how he planned and built a microcontroller-based environmental data logger. The system can sense and record relative light intensity, barometric pressure, relative humidity, and more.
a: This is the environmental data logger’s (EDL) circuit board. b: This is the back of the EDL.
Data acquisition has been an important theme for engineering instructor Miguel Sánchez, who since 2005 has published six articles in Circuit Cellar about projects such as a digital video recorder (Circuit Cellar 174), “teleporting” serial communications via the ’Net (Circuit Cellar 193), and a creative DIY image-processing system (Circuit Cellar 263). An informative interview with Miguel begins on page 28.
Turn to page 38 for an informative article about how to build a compact acceleration data acquisition system. Mark Csele covers everything you need to know from basic physics to system design to acceleration testing.
This is the complete portable accelerometer design. with the serial download adapter. The adapter is installed only when downloading data to a PC and mates with an eight pin connector on the PCB. The rear of the unit features three powerful
rare-earth magnets that enable it to be attached to a vehicle.
In “Hardware-Accelerated Encryption,” Patrick Schaumont describes a hardware accelerator for data encryption (p. 48). He details the advanced encryption standard (AES) and encourages you to consider working with an FPGA.
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This is the embedded processor design flow with FPGA. a: A C program is compiled for a softcore CPU, which is configured in an FPGA. b: To accelerate this C program, it is partitioned into a part for the software CPU, and a part that will be implemented as a hardware accelerator. The softcore CPU is configured together with the hardware accelerator in the FPGA.
Are you now ready to start a new data acquisition project? If so, read George Novacek’s article “Project Configuration Control” (p. 58), George Martin’s article “Software & Design File Organization” (p. 62), and Jeff Bachiochi’s article “Flowcharting Made Simple” (p. 66) before hitting your workbench. You’ll find their tips on project organization, planning, and implementation useful and immediately applicable.
Lastly, on behalf of the entire Circuit Cellar team, I congratulate the winners of the DesignSpark chipKIT Challenge. Turn to page 32 to learn about Dean Boman’s First Prize-winning energy-monitoring system, as well as the other exceptional projects that placed at the top. The complete projects (abstracts, photos, schematic, and code) for all the winning entries are posted on the DesignSpark chipKIT Challenge website.
Circuit Cellar's editorial team comprises professional engineers, technical editors, and digital media specialists. You can reach the Editorial Department at editorial@circuitcellar.com, @circuitcellar, and facebook.com/circuitcellar
