Moving Data Analysis into the Acquisition Hardware

Abstract

Data acquisition for flight test is typically handled by dedicated hardware which performs specific functions and targets specific interfaces and buses. Through the use of an FPGA state machine based design approach, performance and robustness can be guaranteed. Up to now sufficient flexibility has been provided by allowing the user to configure the hardware depending on the particular application. However by allowing custom algorithms to be run on the data acquisition hardware, far greater control and flexibility can be offered to the flight test engineer. As the volume of the acquired data increases, this extra control can be used to vastly reduce the amount of data to be recorded or telemetered. Also real-time analysis of test points can now be done where post processing would previously have been required. This paper examines examples of data acquisition, recording and processing and investigates where data reduction and time savings can be achieved by enabling the flight test engineer to run his own algorithms on the hardware.