There is something wrong with the qtdmm link. I think it got some extra characters (%28) in the URL path somehow. I think this fixes it.

Thank you- you are correct, and your link works better than mine (since mine doesn't work at all!). Let me see if I can still edit it...

OK. Original link repaired...

Hi cwarner7_11,

About a year and a half ago, I bought a cheap USB data acquisition module, the miniLAB 1008, from Measurement Computing (not an endorsement). It was just over $100 then and it has been very useful. As long as you don't need Hi-Res analog, it works quite well.

You can choose between 4 differential or 8 single-ended 12-bit Analog Inputs. It also has 2 Analog Outputs, but they are only 10-bit res.

I also made a terminal board for it so I could take advantage of the rest of the I/O (that weren't terminaled on the front of the module) through the DB37 port:

The software included allows you to log to Excel, so there's your data on the PC.

Not having been even ankle deep into CAELinux, can Excel data be used by some of the apps? I would assume that even if conversions would need to be done, the ubiquitousness of Excel would make apps for that quite available.

Mike

That looks like a pretty handy unit- I have something similar (with fewer inputs and needing a Centronics adapter, but easily programmable), only used these days with my Win 98SE box downstairs in the lab. Also, limited analog resolution (for me, 10 bit resolution is high-definition!). I also wrote a VBA macro years ago for logging directly to Excel from a couple of different DMM's, which was what I used when I needed higher resolution. To do that, I had to add xmcomm, an OpenSource replacement for mscomm which is part of the full MS Visual Basic package, but deprecated in the VBA package that comes with Excel (Remember, I am still using Excel 2000- some of this may have changed in newer versions). I still run Excel in both Wine and VirtualBox (Wine is a lttle light in usb support, but it is possible, depending on the drivers). Your system should work fine in VirtualBox, though. The problem is, one needs a licensed copy of Windows to load into the VirtualBox. If you can get it to work in Wine, you are ahead of the game. There is also the possibility that the generic usb drivers included with Ubuntu will recognize your device directly, without the need for additional drivers.

I don't work much with the OpenOffice spreadsheet because, quite frankly, it just can not compare to Excel. Excel has built-in functions (the FFT is probably the one I use the most), and the older Excel graphics are much, much faster than OpenOffice- especially important when it come time to rescale or zoom in to look at details. I also haven't tried logging directly to OpenOffice Calc yet- it should be possible, I just haven't had the need so far...

Invariably, when I am datalogging, I wind up passing the data through a spreadsheet whether that is the ultimate destination or not. First of all, with Excel 2000, there isn't a better "quick view" solution that I have been able to find. It is also very straight forward going from the spread sheet to a *.csv file, with the data properly formatted for further analysis routines, such as SciLab or Dataplot or just about anything.

Can you send digital signals to the logger from the computer? What do you use for a timing signal- or is this synched with the computer clock? I want to play with your miniLAB!

Charlie

there are some forks to OO http://go-oo.org/discover/with better support for macros

I think there is promise for this too http://www.documentfoundation.org/

the situation with Oracle being what it is [another reason to move away from java]

Hi cwarner7_11,

I also wrote a VBA macro years ago for logging directly to Excel from a couple of different DMM's, which was what I used when I needed higher resolution. To do that, I had to add xmcomm, an OpenSource replacement for mscomm which is part of the full MS Visual Basic package, but deprecated in the VBA package that comes with Excel (Remember, I am still using Excel 2000- some of this may have changed in newer versions).

I remember writing a VBA Excel program that took serial data output from a PLC (miniOCS by HornerAPG) in through a serial port using the mscomm control, and logged the values to a spreadsheet. Maybe we were using earlier than 2000.

I miss those days. Now I'm a Project Manager - it has it's good points, but immersing in the tech, I am not!

Can you send digital signals to the logger from the computer? What do you use for a timing signal- or is this synched with the computer clock? I want to play with your miniLAB!

This should answer all your questions in the preceding paragraph. It came with a Universal Library, which supports:

It also supports LabView up to Version 7.0 (if I remember correctly). I have used LabView modules from the VI Library that was loaded with the miniLAB software. It contained AI, AO, Digital I/O, Counter, Calib and Config, Signal Conditioning, Serial Communication, and Memory functions/modules.

Cheers!

Mike

Many instruments output "CSV" files.

Having done multitudes of data analysis myself, the approach I take is to import the CSV file into excel and create data tables adding columns for categories. I use Excel to then generator pivot tables and charts accordingly.

I have become quite good at it. If you have a mass of raw data you need processed, I am available for hire to process it for you.

Hi

I have implemented a great number of instruments using Debian. The list of tools available is huge and all of them equal to and in most cases much better then their commercial counterpart. Just to list a few.

TCL/TK, Guile, Perl, GCC (able to compile every known source even objectiveC and AVR), clisp, scheme, ruby, python, rexx, bash etc. And of course the very structure of Linux which treats everything as part of the file system allowing you to make use of all the inbuilt commands. There is also three different and excellent real time enhancements to the kernel.

Working with windows is like having your hands tied.

If you are afraid of getting your hands dirty you can always purchase LabView, MetLab, Mathematica, etc. They are all available for Linux.

I have frequently rewritten LabView projects in C, lisp, tcl and TK with very little effort. The results where invariably faster, cleaner and very well received.

Thank you for your introduction of open source to others. We need to get the message out that we are not in the Microsoft jail we do have really good alternate choices.

// ------------------------------------------------
// The Eloi are eating the food
// the Morlocks have so kindly provided.
// Unexamined convenience is the road to slavery.
// -- Frank J. Niertit
// ------------------------------------------------

Frank J. Niertit
Director of Chemical Instrumentation
USC Chemistry Dept.

Actually, I have "rolled my own" on a great variety of platforms- I find Forth to be very, very good for that. c (the original, not the newer flavors) is by far my favorite (and it looks the same for the most part, independent of platform), but I have even been known to do some quick and dirty stuff in Basic...

However, one major issue I have run in to is that too many equipment manufacturers think they should keep their interface protocol proprietary- which means all too often, if one is using commercial equipment, one is either tied to the manufacturers software (and, invariably, Windows), or was is doing a whole lot of guessing.

I see a lot of Tcl/TK in OpenSource, but have done no development with it. As for some of the other, newer languages, I'm pretty lazy- if I can meet my needs in c, I'm not going to bother with learning a new way. Python is maybe an exception- I see more and more Python in OpenSource apps that I use, but I haven't done any data acquisition with that yet...That I know of

Thanks for contributing.

Excellent link, Garthh- thanks. I especially enjoyed the part about being able to provide both stability and performance!

I should have included the original source one of the GS Newsletters

I would like to see additional explanations of the more secure file structure, due to limited root permissions [sudo]

This is the first I've heard someone say that 7 is a "downgrade" from xp. I've found that 7 was the easiest and most intuitive upgrade I've ever made. Also, driver and software incompatibilities have been hardly a problem and I've put it on such a wide variety computers including a x22 thinkpad from 2001 (I did it just for kicks and found it's perfect for downloading stuff). Even my brother (a hard core linux guy who's a computer engineer at ebay) said that win 7 isn't all that bad. I never thought I'd hear that coming from him... lol. But there is also that "to each his own" thing. 75% of what I use my computer for would be ok in Linux, but for that 25% of the time I'm doing photo editing or playing games, I'm much too impatient to reboot my computer. I've had so few problems with windows 7 that I've had no reason to go back to linux (plus my screen calibrator doesn't work in linux and neither does photoshop). I'm just surprised someone is downplaying 7 to the extent of saying xp was better. XP was worse in basically every way, I cringe every time I have to use another xp machine. And as a side note, I really liked Linux Mint. I had pretty good luck with that. It was easy to use, resource friengly, fairly quick and seemed really stable. I used that on my thinkpad x41 tablet pc for a while.

Saying that 7 isn't bad at all, seems faint praise :D

7 is a resource hog

but if you have gaming as a primary goal, I suppose it is one way to go

7, like vista has it's own idea about how/where you should store files & if you like nag screens use 7

The linux distros, are all straight forward & sensible in that regard

Personally I didn't find the downgrade from XP to 7 intuitive, one of the members here kept telling me not to try to use vista like XP, I never could understand how I was to use it?

I spent a couple of weeks with a 7 machine & did find it to be an improvement over vista, but saying something sucks less is not a ringing endorsement

I had the 7 machine to remove a virus & ended up installing mint9 about a month later. The owner has been thrilled ever since

GA

7, like vista has it's own idea about how/where you should store files

That's what drives me up wall with windows. Even XP has it's default location for storing files in some obscure place with a sign on the door which says "beware of the saber toothed tiger", but, at least it's easy to circumvent. I've recently bought my son a laptop with "7" on it, and I still can't get to grips with building a nice user files area which I have complete control of.

Gaming isn't a primary goal, but on occasion it is fun of course :) Windows 7 doesn't put files in such weird places. I mean it has to put stuff somewhere, just because it's another folder doesn't mean it's really a problem. Really, C:/users/nick is the folder where windows puts all my crap. That's not so hard. And you can disable all the nag screens. Whatever one you don't like, just google the name and you'll find a 2 step operation on disabling it. I've actually found 7 to NOT be a resource hog. As for ram, it caches a whole lot that it expects to use, but once an application needs ram that is being taken up by the cache it is instantly deleted and used for other purposes. I was once told that an OS that can effectively use the available ram will be faster than one that doesn't. Also, windows 7 supports I/O prioritization which was a HUGE performance boost over XP. In XP if you had a slow HDD and something was using all the available reads/writes nothing else could get it's bits of data through (even the OS) and xp will come to a complete stop until the operation is complete. That's not the case in 7, as I found on my old thinkpad x41 tablet (with a horrible slow 1.8" hard drive). This machine with a few very very basic optimizations feels WAY faster than it ever did with XP. On the other end of the scope, I have windows 7 installed in my relatively new W510 thinkpad with a quad core i7, 12 GB of ram and a 1 GB nvidia quadro video chip. It has so much ram that once it's booted, with respect to the OS I highly doubt there's any need for a fast SSD because 7 caches anything the OS could need right in ram (and you can even see that the HDD has fewer IO operations). I've had photoshop and other apps use 10 GB of ram and even during those operations, I can multitask by watching HD movies or other CPU intensive operations without a hitch. I don't know what kind of bad luck you guys have had with 7, but I've generally only been impressed. I do like how there are other free alternatives to software in linux, but for me it hasn't been an issue yet. I use matlab and solidworks in windows and at the moment I haven't had a reason to try anything in linux for those purposes.

so how many gb does it take for 7 to even exist 20-30?

there all the BS with public folders to do any sharing on a network

any pre-installed win OS, leaves you high & dry if the HDD goes bad

then there's the basic insecurity of letting every app mess around with the registry, inviting all manner of invasions

Like Randall, I don't find windows to be very user friendly, when it comes to setting up a file system, organized the way the user wants it, not in the way the boys from bellingham want it

To add insult to injury, with windows you get to pay several 100 dollars to get a full version + the joy of having to do restores

And MS recommends you have a Linux LiveCD available to access your file system when things go wrong...

I have a nice VB running XP for when some website will only work with IE

I installed windows 7 on a laptop from 2001 (800 mhz p3, 640 MB ram, 20 GB hdd) and it worked fine. Seriously though, I bought a 2 TERABYTE usb 3.0 drive for $140. Arguments on space aren't as valid as they used to be. I use it for downloading stuff to usb drives. It uses about 10-12 to install (but that's because it has so much reserved for page file... it actually uses that. Other OSes keep the scratch disk separate I think). Sharing isn't so hard. Once you set it up, it's pretty nice. You right click, then Share With -->Nobody, Homegroup (read), Homegroup (read/write), and Specific People. Sure, it's not perfect but it's amazingly easy. It's way more secure than in xp and shared folders from other computers in your "homegroup" show up in "my computer" as a network drive. For being M$, I actually had to say "cheers to you" for creating such a simple but effective system. There's a simple search box in the start menu, and even if you misspell something, it will usually find what you want. In this case, i wanted "network and sharing" so I typed that and pressed enter. Almost instantly, I got the Network and Sharing Center. Click on Change Advanced Settings and you can change a lot of important things. It's super easy, you just have to be willing to learn it and if you don't know you have to google stuff (which I do all the time, and I would definitely have to do more often in Linux). Also, Win7 has a built in drive imaging program to backup all your data. It has all the basic options I could think of needing. When I got my laptop, I did a "base" image. I bought my thinkpad mobile workstation without an optical drive (seriously, I haven't installed any programs via CD/DVD in several years). But it's a really simple system. You can easily install 7 from a flash drive (google and you shall find). Once the installer is loaded you can restore a backup from another USB drive. I'm pretty sure it's so easy, that I'd be willing to say you'd be less screwed with windows than you would be with linux. Also, I haven't had a virus since about 2004. As long as you install updates, you're safe. As long as you don't click on crap that you know you shouldn't, you'd be safe. Find a college student and buy win7 from him. He can get it for free or super cheap (~$30). I bought a copy from my school in Ohio and my school in Austria gives it away for free.

I don't know why it's not keeping my formatting. It's not even saving my paragraph spaces so it's just one huge paragraph :P It's probably because I'm using google chrome.

Because you are using Chrome

you need to use {p} with [] for line breaks

you won't sell me on 7

I never had virus/malware/trojan problems, but I've fixed more than a few that did.

for most users [email, surfing] linux is plenty & requires less care & feeding.

In the past couple of years the learning curve has nearly vanished, flash & all the codecs are a checkbox away on an ubuntu 10.10 install

Yes, sorry about the annoying formatting issue :)

I'm using firefox from now on when I make posts here. And I figure I wouldn't have been able to sell you on 7, but I just felt it was unjustly named a downgrade from xp lol. I think a lot of windows problems starts from people who don't know what they are doing and mess with things (like turn off automatic updates etc...). I honestly think that it's a decent product (especially if you got it legally for free like me!).

I really did like Ubuntu. The "eye candy" desktop graphics features were a nice touch and the interface was friendly and easy to figure out. But I actually have to agree that nowadays linux would be a better option for someone only doing really basic things. You don't even have to think about viruses and updates are much less important. It's probably harder to muck up and it's pretty darned stable.

But what I was just arguing about before was that windows nowadays isn't as bad as a lot of people make it out to be. My longest uptime with my desktop in Ohio was 109 days (no reboots, no updates). I only had to turn it off because I had to go to Germany ;-) This was my daily use computer for school, work, games, movies and downloading. I even had it running "Folding at Home" 24/7 to help out my scores.

For those of you who don't know what that is, Folding at Home is a program that uses your spare CPU cycles to do automated research for Stanford University (so the CPU is at 100% all the time with the process on "low" priority). I've been donating nearly 24/7 for 6 years And of course my new laptop is literally about 30 times faster than the desktop that I used when I first started! lol.

Nickjd-

Can you tell us more about "Folding at Home"? I have been aware of a number of programs for "sharing" CPU cycles, but never been able to connect to one.

There are also participatory sites out there, where one joins in the classification of astronomical objects or geographical objects from images that are a similar way to share the workload, but donating CPU cycles, like for decoding DNA would be a non-participatory approach.

Do you have any say on what Stanford uses those CPU cycles for?

Charlie

Why not start a thread

not all that many people on this site visit here in linux land :D

Thanks for the links- and I agree with Garthh- this would be a good topic for a separate thread. I am sure there are many more sites like folding.standford.edu that do the same sort of thing, and I am sure there are a lot of us out here would love to participate in this sort of research.

That's a good idea. I haven't seen anyone posting this kind of thing here. When I get some time I'll try to make a more complete forum post with more links to howto documents and the like.

Actually, my favorite Windows flavor is 98SE...Which I still use on occasion since I have some laboratory applications that will not port to newer Windows versions. "Downgrading" is what every version of Windows that I have explored (which does not include Windows 7) is like, when compared to 98SE...But that is my opinion.

If you are doing Photoshop or gaming, I would probably recommend Windows 7 over most options, but I find for a lot of my applications- Finite Element Analysis, data analysis (time series data, Fourier transforms, etc), the tools available in Linux are superior to what is available for Windows, unless you have very, very deep pockets. I also find myself dipping down in to Windows on occasion for certain CAD applications, but things are improving in the Linux world in this area as well...But for the most part, for science and engineering, Linux is coming out way on top. Fast (which is important when you are running an FE analysis that requires 18 hours on a dual core machine), low overhead, better memory management, better community support, and so on...

Yuval-

If you are interested in high-end OpenSource Engineering Solutions, have a look at CAELinux. And, spread the word...

Thanks. Hope I'm not alone with this sentiment.