Excel DAQ addon module distributed for free

Previously sold for $195, the ProfessorDAQ addon for Excel is now distributed at no charge.

Previously sold for $195, the ProfessorDAQ addon for Excel is now distributed at no charge.

Designed to give engineers full access to the capabilities of UEI's PowerDAQ analogue and digital I/O cards, it allows them to send out control signals and read back results of analogue or digital readings in a very user-friendly environment.

Further, with the assistance of Visual Basic for Applications, a standard component in Excel, engineers can create sophisticated test routines based on PowerDAQ hardware.

Ever since the first days of PCs, scientists and engineers have adopted spreadsheets for their own needs, typically the plotting and analysis of experimental data.

The biggest problem they've faced is getting real-world data onto a worksheet.

Manual entry is tedious and error-prone.

They've always wanted an easy-to-use, reliable method of automating the collection of real-world data into spreadsheet programs, but a method that doesn't compromise hardware performance in any way.

Overcoming that obstacle in a convenient way, ProfessorDAQ provides a seamless link between UEI's PCI- and PXI-based data-acquisition cards and the world's most popular spreadsheet program, Microsoft Excel.

This utility, now distributed at no charge, imports individual samples or even large waveforms directly into an Excel worksheet.

The utility can also use worksheet data as a source for output functions.

In addition to allowing users to assign worksheet cells to analogue and digital I/O operations, the addon also lets them set up triggering and other control operations.

Users perform all these actions through an intuitive graphical interface that requires no programming.

In this way scientists, engineers and other experimenters can start importing data into a spreadsheet in just a few minutes without the need for any special programming skills or detailed knowledge of the data-acquisition hardware.

The product thus opens to door to automated data collection for thousands of technical professionals who don't want to devote hours to writing and debugging programs in C or learning how to connect icons in a graphical language.

They can now focus on their own work, getting results more quickly and with fewer errors than ever before.

Those who adapt quickly to new technologies needn't feel hampered.

They can access all the power of ProfessorDAQ through scripts they write in VBA (Visual Basic for Applications), which is a core component of Microsoft Office XP and is integrated into Microsoft Excel as well as other Office applications.

VBA takes the same power available through the Visual Basic programming system and applies it to highly functional applications, enabling infinite levels of automation, customisation and integration.

Even better, ProfessorDAQ doesn't hold you back from performing any activity of which the hardware is capable.

Because the Excel screen update rate and the underlying hardware digitisation rate are decoupled, users can digitise at the card's full rated throughput without fearing that screen updates will slow down the operation.

They can also set up Excel plots and graphs that update dynamically with the very latest data to achieve a real-time display.

Unlike most Excel addons, ProfessorDAQ offers several update modes on analogue inputs, giving users the utmost in digitisation and display flexibility.

UEI is especially proud of its continuous mode, which sets this product apart from almost all of its competitors.

In this mode, based on the user-set update rate, ProfessorDAQ fetches and displays the next set of datapoints from the analogue-input buffer.

The utility does so continuously until the process is stopped manually.

Alternatively, in running series mode ProfessorDAQ displays the very latest data in the analogue-input buffer, ignoring any intermediate values.

This mode not only minimises delay between acquisition and display, it can't overrun the input buffer and can operate indefinitely.

Or, in one-shot mode ProfessorDAQ reads one scan of all selected channels, places results in the worksheet cells and halts.

Although ProfessorDAQ removes all the complexities of setting up and running a data-acquisition card, users don't give up any capabilities.

Various menus let them control virtually every aspect of the hardware's operation: the number of points to acquire; the screen update rate; the digitisation rate; sampling mode; source or destination worksheet cells; which channels to use, in which order, with a separate gain for each; bipolar or unipolar operation; single-ended or differential operation; and start/stop trigger setup (internal or external, on rising or falling edge).

And unlike with almost every other product in this class, with ProfessorDAQ users can run multiple subsystems simultaneously.

Thus users can implement custom closed-loop control algorithms within Excel, controlling analogue or digital outputs based on values from analogue inputs.

ProfessorDAQ is available free of charge to users of UEI's PowerDAQ cards.

The version of ProfessorDAQ individuals download from the web is a demo version, and to enable the full capabilities of the software they must request an authorisation key.

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