Article: Heavyweight board Lightweight price

If the specifications for your data acquisition boards are high, but you want to keep the system costs down, a new series of boards from MCC should be of interest, as NIGEL TREVARTHEN explains.

If you have to specify the widely used National Instruments E Series of data acquisition boards, Adept Scientific now has a lower-cost alternative, with the launch of a functionally equivalent range from Measurement Computing (MCC).

Already creating a big impact in the USA, the new PCI-DAS6025, 6034 and 6035 boards are the exact equivalents to their NI counterparts in terms of resolution, sample rate and I/O count. Indeed, the new boards come with the tagline “the only difference is the price”.
Design quality, as well as look and feel, is first class. Extraordinarily for the price, full user manuals and individual calibration certificates are included with each board.

Fully screened connectors are featured throughout. In fact, the new boards have even wider software support.
There's a choice of software for professional developers, occupational developers and non-programming users. In addition to the option of support for LabView and Matlab, owners of the new PCI-DAS boards have support for Agilent VEE and the SoftWire graphical programming system for Windows Visual Studio.NET and Visual Basic 6.

In fact, MCC's Universal Library software option enables interfacing to control systems written in almost any language or programming environment.

The boards cover 12 and 16 bit measurement across four input voltage ranges, +/-10V, +/-5V, +/-500mV and +/-50mV.

A 200Ksample/s sampling rate is offered, with absolute accuracy as good as +/-3.10mV on the +/-10V range of the PCI-DAS6035 - a significant improvement over the equivalent NI board.

Autocalibration is standard. Complete specifications and comparisons are available on the web, enabling potential users to make an in-depth comparison before taking advantage of the significant cost savings offered by these interesting new boards.