DESIGNING AN AUTOMATIC FORMAT GENERATOR FOR A NETWORK DATA ACQUISITION SYSTEM

Abstract

In most current PCM based telemetry systems, an instrumentation engineer manually creates the sampling format. This time consuming and tedious process typically involves manually placing each measurement into the format at the proper sampling rate. The telemetry industry is now moving towards Ethernet-based systems comprised of multiple autonomous data acquisition units, which share a single global time source. The architecture of these network systems greatly simplifies the task of implementing an automatic format generator. Automatic format generation eliminates much of the effort required to create a sampling format because the instrumentation engineer only has to specify the desired sampling rate for each measurement. The system handles the task of organizing the format to comply with the specified sampling rates. This paper examines the issues involved in designing an automatic format generator for a network data acquisition system.