About Us and What We Do
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Microstar Laboratories makes PCI-bus Data Acquisition Processor (DAP) boards for PC systems. A unique1 product feature – onboard intelligence – may make all the difference in the world to you and your application. That and anti-aliasing. And we provide you with easy expansion and plenty of application engineering help on top of that.
If this looks good so far, read on.
We make DAP boards, and every one we make has an onboard processor that runs DAPL, a multitasking real-time operating system optimized for data acquisition and control applications. A user normally controls DAPL through Windows2, either locally or over a network. Every standard DAP model in current production also will run under Linux.
DAPL makes it easy to configure a DAP board for high-performance applications under Windows or Linux. The onboard operating system supports over 100 easy-to-use commands optimized for data acquisition and control. A complete application can require as few as six or seven commands out of the many available. Command categories include
- DSP – Filtering
- DSP – Spectral Analysis
- Sensor Conditioning
- Software Triggering
- Process Control
You can check out the complete command list (with brief descriptions) now. To receive a complete set of our user manuals, including the DAPL manual, download our DAPtools Basic CD or call us.
Continued (FFTs, filters, triggers, networks)...
connecting the DAP board to the world
Many people want to know that, even if their system starts with only a few channels, they can expand it at any time with only a few simple steps. DAPL takes care of all the software details associated with expansion, so software on the PC – LabVIEW, VEE, VB or C programs or whatever – need address nothing more complicated than a higher logical channel count. DAPL also supports multiple DAPs in one PC, and enables DAPcell software servers to support multiple PCs in a single synchronized data acquisition system.
A DAP board that plugs into a PCI slot forms the foundation of any new system from Microstar Laboratories. A channel architecture based on Eurocards – plug-in hardware that mounts in industry-standard 19-inch racks – provides expansion, termination, and other functions that greatly extend the reach of even a single DAP.
Whenever you digitize real-world frequencies higher than half the sampling rate, you corrupt the data. Samples of these higher frequencies appear in any subsequent analysis only as lower frequency aliases. And by that stage you can do nothing – nothing at all – to correct the problem. So unless you know for sure that the signal you measure contains none of these higher frequencies at energy levels that your sensors can detect, you have to deal with the issue up front.
Microstar Laboratories provides two solutions to this problem: one in the form of a specialized DAP for high-frequency applications, and the other – with lower cutoff frequencies – as a Eurocard-format expansion board for all other DAPs.3
extensive application engineering support
We take support very seriously. Take a look at our Product Life Cycle pages – especially if you are an industrial customer. After over two decades of providing application engineering support, we have become skilled at finding out exactly what a customer needs and at working with each customer to come up with a system that performs as required. We look forward to doing that for you. Check us out, give us a call, and tell us what you want to do. In the US, use our toll-free line: 1-888-MSTARLABS (678-2752). Outside the US, contact one of our international distributors or email our sales staff.
- Footnote 1 [unique]
- Other companies now feature some degree of onboard intelligence. Our approach remains unique, however: engineers who use compiler-provided IDE implementations like Microsoft Visual C++ and Visual Studio or Borland C++Builder to build applications on a PC under Windows can use the same tools to build applications to run on a data acquisition board under a real-time operating system.
- Footnote 2 [Windows]
- Microstar Laboratories products work with these Microsoft operating systems: Windows Vista, Windows 2003, Windows XP, Windows 2000, Windows NT, Windows Millennium Edition, Windows 98, and Windows 95.
- Footnote 3 [anti-aliasing]
- Both solutions employ a built-in four-pole lowpass Butterworth filter on every channel before analog-to-digital conversion. The specialized DAP, the iDSC 1816, uses onboard DSP chips to implement further signal processing on the filtered data.
During your visit to our Web site, you can download the DAPtools Basic CD. This contains all our user manuals for our software and hardware products in Windows Help format as well as in PDF format. You can find on it complete descriptions of every single DAPL command and, of course, much else besides.
