Low Cost Ethernet Based Data Acquisition System in Linux Platform

Abstract — This paper reports on the Low cost Ethernet based Data Acquisition System in Linux Platform. Due to the high cost of Ethernet based Data Acquisition Systems (DAQ) in market, an attempt has been made to develop and implement a low cost, high speed, portable and easy make DAQ which suit for general purpose instrumentation systems. In present work Linux operating system, GCC C and g++ compiler used for software development. For hardware, IC MAX197 is interfaced with Personal computers ’ Parallel port, which works with 12-bit resolution, 8 single ended channels and 100Ksps at 2MHz clock rates. And the temperature sensor LM35Z is connected to zero channel of ADC for evaluation of system performance. Server is the main core to control the DAQ circuitry while Ethernet controller TCP/IP protocol has the responsibility of transmitting data among the client PCs. The system has been tested for different clients and is highly scalable in size and performance. Index Terms—Ethernet, parallel port, DAQ, server, client, Linux, Qt4, MySQL