A Low-Cost Stand-Alone Multichannel Data Acquisition, Monitoring, and Archival System With On-Chip Signal Preprocessing

The objective of this paper is to design a new generation of affordable sophisticated data acquisition and processing (DAQP) systems. Because of the proposed system hardware reconfigurability, it can be used to meet the need of many real-world applications while keeping the cost of a device low. The hardware implementation of the different processing functions of the device allows for high-speed processing without the need of expensive general-purpose processors, as is the case of computer-based or microcontroller-based data acquisitions (DAQs). The target technology of implementing the proposed design is the system on chip via field-programmable gate array (SoC-FPGA). A four-channel DAQP was designed, developed, and tested in the Embedded Systems Design Laboratory, Tennessee Technological University, Cookeville. Various modules of the conceptual design are implemented and verified. Performance evaluation and cost comparisons are provided. The comparison showed that the results of the proposed instrument are comparable to existing technologies at a fraction of the cost.