When selecting data acquisition hardware for a distributed measurement system, you must keep in mind specific requirements. Whereas localized signal conditioning and data acquisition are required by the very nature of the system, other features like the ability to synchronize measurements across all of the distributed nodes, ruggedness, and onboard processing can be selected and customized to meet your application needs. The network chosen to distribute and communicate with your nodes can also be an important decision, depending on the application and its requirements.
Localized Signal Conditioning and Data Acquisition
In a distributed measurement system, the sensor signal conditioning and data acquisition are located within nodes close to the sensors making the measurements. Signal conditioning can be positioned either external to the data acquisition devices, or can be internal to them. By integrating signal conditioning into the data acquisition devices, you can reduce system complexity and cost. Purchasing integrated signal conditioning means that the vendor has done the integration, testing, and certification for you, making it much easier to design and deploy your test system. Often, the total system cost is also reduced by purchasing components with integrated signal conditioning because of the economics scale vendors have over end users.
Ruggedness
Distributed systems tend to be located within the same test environments as the UUTs, so as to get as close to the sensors as possible. This often means that the data acquisition equipment can be exposed to harsh and demanding conditions where standard desktop equipment would give inaccurate data or fail entirely. Ensuring that your signal conditioning and data acquisition equipment can survive your test environment can help ensure you get accurate data the first time and eliminate the need for costly retests. Possible requirements for your system could include extreme temperature ranges for product validation testing, shock and vibration survivability if the system is to be mounted directly to a machine, or hazardous location certifications to ensure the system can safely operate in marine or explosive environments.
Although it is possible to design enclosures for any data acquisition system to meet these ruggedness requirements, it is often cheaper to purchase a system already tested and certified to survive the conditions. In developing and integrating your own ruggedness solutions, design, materials, testing, and compliance costs can quickly add up, in addition to the time to properly go through these steps. Vendors can amortize these costs over thousands of units, meaning they can offer the same benefits at a lower price.
Learn more about ruggedness and how to choose the right system for your environment.
Synchronization
Synchronization, at its most basic level, is ensuring that all pieces of a system have the same concept of time, usually by sharing clocks and trigger signals. It is often required in large measurement systems so that data taken throughout the test can be properly correlated and analyzed. Without proper synchronization, there is no way to know if two measurements happened simultaneously or, in the case of stimulus/response type testing, which stimulus the measurement is a response of. For example, Boeing used a large array of distributed microphone systems to triangulate the major noise sources of airplanes in flyover testing by measuring the delay for the sound of the plane to reach the different microphones. If the distributed microphone nodes were not properly synchronized, there would be no way to properly measure the delay between different nodes because they would not have the same concept of time.
With centralized measurement systems, synchronization is fairly straightforward because most systems are in the same chassis. A distributed system has inherent difficulties that must be overcome to synchronize systems over sometimes long distances. You can choose from several types of synchronization for use in distributed systems including software, time-based, and signal-based.
Software synchronization relies on data acquisition software to send a start trigger to all devices at the same time. This is the poorest implementation of synchronization and is generally on the order of milliseconds. Because no information is shared between distributed subsystems, their internal clocks can drift over time, reducing your synchronization over the course of the measurement.
Time-based synchronization gives system components a common reference for time from a known clock source. You can then generate events, triggers, and clocks based on this common reference time. For long distances, you can use a variety of time references including GPS, IEEE 1588v2, IEEE 802.1AS, and IRIG-B to correlate and synchronize measurements anywhere in the world with absolute timing with or without a direct connection between the measurement systems. Time-based synchronization is most often used to reduce or eliminate the need to run synchronization cabling between subsystems, instead using network cables already in place or wireless synchronization clocks such as GPS.
Signal-based synchronization physically connects clocks and triggers between subsystems. Typically, this provides the highest precision synchronization, but requires signal wire connecting your subsystems to share the synchronization signals. The downside of signal-based synchronization is there may be skew and uncertainly from routing delays along the physical signal wire.
Learn more about the different types of synchronization.
Onboard Intelligence
Though not required to build a distributed system, data acquisition nodes with onboard intelligence can have significant benefits for your system. By placing intelligence on your nodes, you give them the ability to distribute data analysis and possibly control your subsystems, offloading it from the central computer. Distributed data analysis can reduce the amount of data you are sending back to the main computer over the network, significantly reducing the network traffic and required bandwidth. Rather than pass all the raw measured waveforms across the network, you can perform analysis locally and then pass back only results to the central computer for storage or integration into larger analysis and decision making. Of course, you can also always send raw waveforms over the network should the situation arise.
You can choose from three different levels of onboard intelligence, each offering different levels of flexibility and complexity.
Windows is likely the most familiar system choice. With Microsoft continuing to invest in its Windows embedded system, there are limited reliability concerns with using it for a measurement application. Additionally the ability to run a user interface directly on it could be a benefit for your application, as well as being able to run common .exe windows applications without having to worry about coding for other more common embedded systems.
Real-time OSs (RTOSs) are more likely to be used in distributed measurement systems because of their reliability and deterministic nature. By guaranteeing that commands and measurements are executed within certain time constraints, real-time systems are well suited to a measurement system with a high need for uptime and reliability or with deterministic tight timing requirements.
FPGAs are reprogrammable silicon chips and offer the ultimate in flexibility and customizability for distributed systems. Reprogrammable silicon also has the same flexibility of software running on a processor-based system, but it is not limited by the number of processing cores available. Unlike processors, FPGAs are truly parallel in nature, so different processing operations do not have to compete for the same resources. Additionally, because the code is written into silicon chips, an FPGA can measure, analyze, and then output data much faster than a processor-based system.
Network
The network you distribute your system with is just as critical as the hardware that is distributed. Depending on the distribution distance, data bandwidth, synchronization, and determinism requirements, there are a wide variety of networks that you could choose. Though there are communication networks based on serial communication technologies, this article focuses on Ethernet-based technologies that continue to become more and more commonplace and can offer more benefits than serial communication and at a lower price.
Ethernet (UDP) is standard Ethernet technology that serves to only broadcast data. UDP is a multicast protocol that routes packets from the controller to multiple destinations. This is an efficient communication method for one controller to broadcast data to multiple receivers, but it can create broadcast storms that consume network bandwidth. There is no guarantee that information has been received and so should be used only for slowly updating noncritical data.
Ethernet (TCP/IP) is also standard Ethernet technology that is better suited for critical data. TCP/IP buffers data and implements a handshake process between senders and receivers to ensure data is properly received and can work well for crucial data and be used for either single-point or streaming data.
OPC (OLE for Process Control) is a standard that was developed to allow different devices from different vendors to communicate with each other over a common vendor agnostics protocol. Most suppliers of industrial data acquisition and control devices are designed to work with OPC.
Modbus is a nondeterministic protocol with a simple client/server architecture that uses standard Ethernet hardware and the TCP/IP transport layer. It is ideal for applications that need to mix hardware from multiple vendors and require low to moderate bandwidth.
EtherCAT was developed by Beckhoff and integrates synchronization and deterministic data transfer into a master/slave architecture. EtherCAT is optimized for single-point communication and is common in applications with motion such as machine control.