Recently, however, I’ve observed a change in the requests. Today’s typical user has a spreadsheet and can graph data quite well, thank you very much. Also, most data-acquisition systems advertise easy-to-use interfaces.

Factor in the lower cost and higher power of today’s desktop computers, and you’ve got a changed market. Fewer companies are willing to spend large amounts of money on custom hardware and software development. You have the choice to adapt or die.

This month, I’d like to participate in this new world order or at least the embedded corner of it. I’ve been threatening to write a general-purpose data logger, so here we go. My goal is to take an off-the-shelf, data-acquisition board, combine it with some Visual Basic (VB) software, and chart the data. I’d like to develop generic code for this article so that you can easily alter my work to suit your needs. (If you wish to compile the code, download the source code because it has not been altered, as the Listings have been, for viewing.)

I’ve done some work with the Micromint Answer MAN modules and would like to use them as the basis for the data-acquisition system. They’re low cost and powerful. I’ll let you decide if they’re easy to use.

I’m going to use a modular design for the critical interfaces to all the major components so they can be easily rewritten. VB requires a modular discipline to develop a good design. Adapting it to your hardware should be straightforward.

   NEXT