Remote Telemetry With Your PC?

hyacinthus asks: "For some projects I'm working on, I'd like a system for acquiring data (as from the output of an instrumentation amplifier) from a module that would be separate from a PC, a maximum distance of perhaps several hundred feet at most, and the use of cable or wire is not an option. My bandwidth requirements are very small--perhaps a hundred 12-bit samples per second would do it. I would like the data acquisition module to be as small as possible. And I'd like the possibility of acquiring data from more than one module, rather like a multiple-channel data acquisition system." Are there any radio-based PC products that can be adapted to suit this sort of task?

"Commercial data acquisition products for personal computers all tend to be rather spendy, and none that I've seen make any provision for wireless telemetry. I've been considering designing and building something, probably using one of the commercial available USB development kits (see, for example, ActiveWire's USB board). But I'm no electrical engineer (a few digital design classes and some self-teaching from Horowitz and Hill, and that's it), so I'd like to ask if there's anything out there which does what I want."

Comments

Freewave

[kfstark]

We have been using freewave radios (www.freewave.com) that are basically radio serial links. The nice thing about them is that they can be used as repeaters that allow multiple hops up to 100+km (a little overkill for your need). They can be used in a point to point mode and in a TDMA mode where the signals are timesliced (up to 16 connections) into the data stream and can be pulled out on the other end. Throughput is up to 115200 without repeaters and 57600 with 1 or two repeaters. We use them extensively in the SCIGN (Southern California GPS Network) to transmit GPS data back to our hub (www-socal.wr.usgs.gov/scign).

Unfortunately they are a little expensive at about $1200 per radio.