New from m+p international for portable data acquisition of strain, temperature and vibration signals is the compact and rugged cube I/O chassis together with our Coda (Continuous Data Acquisition) software product family.

The Ethernet-based cube I/O chassis from United Electronic Industries is ideally suited for a wide variety of industrial, aerospace and laboratory data acquisition and control applications. Use the cube as a PC front-end for real-time capture and display or upload its acquisition settings to run stand-alone capturing data to an SD card or an external hard disk via USB. This data can be recovered later and re-played and processed by the Coda software.

The small 3-slot cube only measures 4" x 4.1" x 4", it's "big" brother provides slots for 6 I/O boards and is 5.8" high. They operate from - 40 to + 85 °C with 50 g shocks and up to 70,000 feet. For larger applications United Electronic Industries also offers compact, rugged I/O racks. These racks provide two Gigabit Ethernet interfaces and slots for up to 6 or 12 I/O boards, allowing the boards to be quickly and easily installed and removed directly from the front of the rack.

A wide variety of I/O boards are available for voltage input, current input, thermocouples, strain gauges, VDT/LVDT, digital I/O, counter, etc. The boards can be installed in any combination and will provide both ICP® signal conditioning and excitation voltage, thus being ideal for signal mixing.

Coda is a full-featured software platform for data acquisition, signal analysis and process monitoring from tens to thousands of input channels. The intuitive graphical user interface facilitates set-up, operation and analysis, thus leading to precise, repeatable results quickly. The extensive built-in features and tools offer a functionality that was previously available only in custom packages. These features include intuitive configuration tools, user-definable channel groups, automatic instrument identification, real-time alarm monitoring and limit checking, sophisticated data interpretation and display, online graphical data analysis and comprehensive visualization.

Captured data can be exported to analysis packages such as m+p international's SO Analyzer, Matlab® or Microsoft Excel for comprehensive analysis and reporting. SO Analyzer provides a full range of dynamic analysis applications with extensive capabilities for browsing, viewing, editing, analyzing and reporting data as well as with full ActiveX compliance.