STEVENS

• Data acquisition from a wide variety of devices, including Modbus, Allen Bradley DF1, and a flexible serial and Ethernet communications backbone including a traffic monitor. DAQFactory can even act as a Modbus slave.
• Continuous or conditional logging of data to ASCII and binary files or to ODBC databases. Automatic persistence files make historical data retrieval easy, or query data from your ODBC database.
• Unlimited user designable screens using 43 different components, from basic text, panels, and edit boxes, to gauges, knobs, trend graphs, three dimensional graphs, and much more.
• A complete multitasking scripting engine with the flexibility to provide total automation.
• PID loop control.
• Alarming with various notifications, including email, pager, and voice synthesized notifications over the phone.
• Network connectivity for real time data sharing, and web server capabilities.

Data Acquisition and Manipulation using DAQFactory

Whether you have 10 I/O points or 1000, keeping track of your data can be difficult. DAQFactory's channels take care of the hard work for you. Channels are the center point of the DAQFactory architecture. They provide the link between your I/O and all the other components in DAQFactory. Creating channels is usually as simple as filling out a table. Each channel contains the details to identify your I/O and a name. The channel name is then used throughout the rest of DAQFactory to identify the I/O point. The details of the hardware do not need to be remembered.

Simply creating the channel will start DAQFactory acquiring your data. The timing parameter allows you to specify how often you want DAQFactory to request data from your device. Each channel can have a different polling interval allowing you to acquire data at different rates from different I/O points. Other tweaks are also available at the channel level to allow you to average your data on the fly, control memory usage and networking.

DAQFactory provides a significant amount of data processing and analysis tools to complete your data acquisition tasks and convert your data into something useful. Since DAQFactory integrates the data analysis with the data acquisition and data display, you can perform your data analysis on your data as you are taking it.

The main tool for data processing is called expressions. Expressions are formulas that are used in many different places throughout DAQFactory where variable data is needed. Expressions can take a simple channel name or be a complex calculation on multiple data points. DAQFactory allows all the standard mathematical processing you may need, from math functions, to Boolean operators, to thermocouple conversions, to string manipulation functions and more. All the functions in DAQFactory can be used on your live data in real time, even in graphs. This means you get your results immediately!

DaqFactory Custom Screens and Presentations

Simply acquiring and logging data, although an important part, is not nearly as useful as being able to view the state of your system in real time. Since just about every data acquisition application is different, DAQFactory allows you to design your own screens to display your data and control your system in the best way appropriate for your system.

No compilation is required. You can design your screens, add control loops, tweak logging, or edit your channels while you are taking data. There is no need to stop your process and recompile. This is especially useful when creating your screens. Not only does it mean that you can add a new graph or other control half way through your process, but you can see your data and how your newly created screens will interact with it as your are creating the screens.

With DAQFactory you can create an unlimited number of screens, and can even overlay them or display popup windows to keep important information on top. There are 40 screen components that you can use to display your data in various formats. You can combine these components in any way to create your own unique system, from a virtual instrument to an animated schematic of your process or experiment.

All of the components are modified using simple parameters windows. This makes it very easy to tweak every component to display exactly how you want them to. If you require advanced control over the components, most all the parameters of each component are available programmatically from within DAQFactory's scripting engine.

DAQFactory Alarm Conditions

DAQFactory alarming allows you to watch for different events that may occur within your system and flag them. This allows you to see if your system did something unusual while you were not watching. Unlike other software which only allows you to monitor for a single parameter going above or below one or two threshold points, DAQFactory allows you to create an alarm that watches for multiple conditions to occur.

When the alarm does occur, the alarm is logged to disk and displayed in a table. The alarm remains displayed in the table until you acknowledge that you have seen the alarm. You can also have DAQFactory play a sound, email you, call you on the phone, or perform any automated task when the alarm event occurs. You can have as many alarms as you need, and creating them is as simple as filling in a few parameters.