Hey guys, I am thinking of doing the following project as i'm in my final year. A data acquisition sytem that will read values (such as temperature, humidity, soil dryness) and through a software, to be able to turn on the fans, turn on an electrovavle and supply water etc)

Is there a posibility to construct the board on my own? I cannot present my final year's project using a ready-made card.

Any info or circuit diagrams for such systems?
thanx

 

Sounds to me like re-inventing the wheel. Whoever gives you directions should make clear what are the purpose and the objectives: Purpose - condition soil for agricultural purposes. Objectives A. Generate application software (makes sense - to understand the underlying control algorithm) B. Design general purpose computing platform + operating system (why on earth should you do that!) C. Design sensing and actuating interfaces (see above).

Just my 0.05 $ Meir

 

i shall suggest u to study micro controllers
then u will be able to any type of intefacing with pc.

 

It is not difficult to design your dataacquisition board but i would say then it will be a project of its own... You need to decide which platform you shall be building a board, i mean PCI, ISA or serial port based, GPIB etc..

For all of them you need to understand the protocol and format of data. After that you need to udnerstand the addressing, data tranfer, and after that you can design a dataacquisition board.
What i would suggest you is to either design a board on serial port as the speed of you acquisition is not high and it will be easy. Find a ADC, amplifier, etc for your application.
I would also like to bring to your notice that you need to condition the signals from various sensors like for thermocouple you need to give gain and do cold junction compensation.
So i would suggest you to concentrate on your project instead of making on dataacquisition system and use the commercially available one like from National Instruments.
http://www.ni.com

 

what i am thinking is: an interface card that will have 3 inputs throu sensors. Temperature, air humidity and soil ph. As for output, it's going to be 2 analogue outputs to turn on/off relays.

Does it make more sense now guys?

Any advice??

 

Look at the LABJACK at www.labjack.com
It's very in expensive I/O device that actually works pretty good.

Also, you could use the serial port for crude I/O, you would have to wriet a little VB code.

 

Hi.

Believe it or not, I'm kinda on the very similar situation right now. I'm on my final project, designing this system, with sensors on temperature, humidity, and illumination, all combined together using fuzzy logic to run some outputs. I'm using 8255 interface under IBM compt's PC ISA bus, Delphi language, under MS windows. I'm kinda stuck here, so, does anybody got any clue where on earth I should find some appropriate literatures ( or maybe someway I can do to sleep well tonight.. ) let me know.

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