Bulk Creation of Data Acquisition Parameters

Abstract

Modern data acquisition systems can be very time consuming to configure. The most time consuming aspect of configuring a data acquisition system is defining the measurements that the system will collect. Each measurement has to be uniquely identified in the system and the system needs to know what data the measurement will sample. Data acquisition systems are capable of sampling thousands of measurements in a single test flight. If all of the measurements are created by hand, it can take many hours to input all of the required measurements into the data acquisition system's setup software. This process can also be extremely tedious since many measurements are very similar. This paper will examine several possible solutions to the problem of rapidly creating large numbers of data acquisition measurements. If the list of measurements that need to be created already exists in an electronic format then the simplest approach would be to create an importer. The two main ways to import data are XML and comma separated value files. This paper will discuss the advantages and disadvantages of both approaches. In addition to importers, this paper will discuss a system that can be used to create large numbers of similar measurements very quickly. This system is ideally suited to MILSTD- 1553 and ARINC-429 bus data. It exploits the fact that most bus measurements are typically very similar to each other. For example, 1553 measurements typically differ only in terms of the command word and the selected data words. This system allows the user to specify ranges of data words for each command word. It can then create the measurements based on the user specified ranges.