Acquisition cards take signal conditioning onboard

Tiny low-cost stackable solution is ideal for space-constrained embedded or portable applications.

Mosaic Industries has added signal conditioning to its 2 x 2.5in Wildcard series, offering convenient interfaces to analogue sensors and actuators.

This tiny low-cost stackable solution is ideal for space-constrained embedded or portable applications.

A stack of two mezzanine boards dubbed Mosaic Wildcards offers four channels of 4-20mA inputs and four channels of 4-20mA outputs with 16bit resolution.

In addition, it provides four channels each of 0-10V inputs and outputs.

One board, a general-purpose analogue I/O Wildcard features eight channels unipolar, single-ended or four channels unipolar, differential 16bit resolution voltage inputs and eight channels of 12bit resolution voltage outputs.

The inputs and outputs may use onboard or external references, and excitation voltages are provided for external sensors.

The second board, a signal conditioning Wildcard extends the capabilities of the analogue I/O Wildcard by increasing its input and output voltage range and adding current inputs and outputs.

It amplifies four DAC outputs on the analogue I/O Wildcard to provide 0 to 10V outputs and attenuates four A/D inputs to allow voltages up to 10V.

It also converts the other four DAC outputs on the analogue I/O Wildcard to 0 to 20mA outputs and converts the other four A/D inputs to 0 to 20mA inputs.

The board is easily customised for other input/output voltage or current ranges.

A package of precoded device driver functions makes it easy to use these Wildcards.

High level functions initialise the A/D and DAC, acquire 16bit samples from the A/D, and write 12bit values to the DAC.

This code is available as a precompiled "kernel extension" library to C and Forth programmers.

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