A Compaq-286 Micro-Processor Based High-Speed High-Density Digital Data- Acquisition and Recording System. Volume 1. System Overview

A design is presented for a state-of-the-art high-speed high- density data-acquisition system based on a commercially available COMPAQ-286 microcomputer. The system utilizes an in house developed AD board, capable of sampling 31 channels expandable to 62 with 16-bit resolution, and with an aggregate sample rate of 100 kbytessec. Data are logged on a Hewlett Packard 9144 digital cassette drive that uses 68 megabyte formatted cassettes. To achieve the required throughput, the software, written in 286-assembler, is interrupt-driven and uses direct memory access on output. The data-acquisition system is described in two volumes, the first giving a system overview, and the second providing sufficient software and hardware for the system to be reproduced.