Comparison of two Measurement and Control Systems based on Microcontroller and LabView

Author: Mohammed Tahar (SUNY Brockport, Department of Physics)

Abstract

The successful completion of many scientific experiments requires the capabilities of automated data acquisition with high sensitivity as well as accurate control-signals generation. Two systems performing these tasks were built one using an Intel 8051-based microcontroller and the second, for comparison, using LabView programming environment and National Instruments Data Acquisition (NI-DAQ) hardware. In the first, analog-to-Digital Converters (ADCs) are used for data acquisition and Digital-to-Analog Converters (DACs) control the generation of excitation and reference signals. The ADCs and DACs are mapped to the microcontroller as external memory and are operated through an addressing interface. The DACs drive analog circuits that generate trigonometric waves. The microcontroller runs a program that specifies the parameters of generated excitation and control signals using the DACs, acquires data through the ADCs, performs special-purpose computations on it, and forwards results to a PC. Programs are loaded from a general-purpose computer through serial communication interface using the bootstrap loader of the microcontroller. The main reason for second system is the testability of the idea using the computational prowess of LabView and its run time engine.