Product category:
Sensors and Data Acquisition
News Release from: Microstar Laboratories | Subject: MSXB 078
Edited by the Electronicstalk Editorial
Team on 28 May 2007
Digital I/O board performs in isolation
Digital I/O expansion hardware combines simultaneous operation on all channels with an isolated ground to protect the application from both these sources of error.
Systems designers now can eliminate ground currents - a potential source of noise in measurement and control signals - and eliminate timing errors from high-channel count digital I/O New digital I/O expansion hardware from Microstar Laboratories combines simultaneous operation on all channels with an isolated ground to protect the application from both these sources of error
This article was originally published on Electronicstalk on 28 Jun 2007 at 8.00am (UK)
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This hardware complements a growing family of analogue and digital signal-conditioning expansion boards that make it easy to implement signal conditioning in data acquisition systems.
The new board - part number MSXB 078 - provides 16 digital inputs and 16 digital outputs on an HD62 connector, with headers for alternate connectors.
Eight MSXB 078 boards connected to a single DAP board give it 128 digital inputs and 128 digital outputs - all operating simultaneously and with a ground isolated from the PC.
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More digital outputs, up to a total of 1008, can be driven by a single DAP board simply by adding more MSXB 078 boards.
MSXB 078 boards slot into a backplane in a standard industrial enclosure like other signal-conditioning products that conform to the external hardware specifications of the Microstar Laboratories channel architecture: signal connectors on 3U (100mm high) Eurocard B (220mm deep) boards - Eurocards - that preprocess a signal in some way.
A backplane connector on each board connects it to a digital backplane factory-fitted into the industrial enclosure.
An interface board that also plugs into the backplane connects to a DAP board controlled by a PC.
A 19in rack-mountable industrial enclosure can hold twenty MSXB 078 boards connected to a single DAP board for a total of 128 digital inputs and 320 digital outputs.
Every DAP board includes an onboard processor running a real-time operating system that Windows applications that support DLL calls can communicate with - and control.
You can communicate with and control a DAP board from DAPstudio - a Windows application from Microstar Laboratories - as well as from third-party (or your own) software.
DAP boards also communicate among themselves independently of Windows to synchronise their clocks with one another.
They then all work synchronously as a networked data acquisition system.
So, even if the application has hundreds - or even thousands - of digital inputs and outputs on MSXB 078 boards distributed over a network, all these channels sample sensors or update actuators simultaneously, as a single synchronised system.
And none of these channels introduce noise from ground currents.
For applications that have - or could have - many channels of digital I/O, applications where you want to protect signals from noise, where precise timing matters, and where you would like compact packaging, take a look at the synchronised PC-based data acquisition and control systems produced by Microstar Laboratories.
New digital I/O expansion products let you build systems with 128 channels of digital input and 128 channels of digital output on eight MSXB 078 boards in a single 19-inch rack-mountable industrial enclosure connected to a single DAP board controlled by a PC.
And these systems are scalable: you can configure them in multiples across a network as a single synchronised system.
The company will supply evaluation hardware and software at no charge.
You can download a full version of the latest (DAPstudio) software to evaluate it.
You do not need DAP hardware to try out some of the features of DAPstudio.
The MSXB 078 board costs US $330 and is available now.
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