Project update 3 of 12
We’ve received a bunch of great questions on use cases and how the OpenLogger will work so we wanted to share some resources that we hope will be useful.
In our campaign video we listed several use cases for OpenLogger that highlight one of its definining feature. The WiFi connectivity. With the option of connecting to the OpenLogger via WiFi, applications that wouldn’t be possible otherwise, such as remote monitoring or logging, logging on a mobile design, or where electrical isolation from a computer is necesary.
But what might that look like? We took our office bot for a spin to demonstrate!
Our robot is heavy, it’s a pretty reactive to the controls, and it moves! With a data logger, or data acquisition device that requires a connection to the computer we wouldn’t be able to log or stream data, during a real test run.
We are steadily making progress on the UI, firmware and software for OpenLogger. As mentioned in previous updates, we have firmware development complete for many of the features, and are in the process of adding support for streaming data over USB which is one of the biggest challenges.
Over the weekend we ran a sampling stress test on the OpenLogger. This was a firmware test so the data wasn’t being stored on SD and wasn’t going to the UI. It was set to sample 8 channels at 62.5kS/s (aggregate of 500kS/s). All channels were read into the backlog buffer and then converted the ADC data to voltages and stored them in a ring buffer.
Throughout the test the OpenLogger took over 15.2 billion samples (or an aggregate of 121.6 billion individual samples as there are 8 channels sampling).
This was an exciting step in our journey to streaming data.
If you want to see our planned firmware release schedule, you’ll find that in Update 1.
At the same time our software developers are optimizing the UI for data logging, and making sure the Digilent Agent can connect to the OpenLogger and achieve the performance we want. So far it works in Windows and we are having some issues in Mac and Linux. So we can say at this point that Windows is fully supported, and the rest are in the works.
If you interested in seeing what it will take to get the OpenLogger up and running, the experience is very similar to the OpenScope. In the next few updates we’ll show a video of exactly what the process is like you’ll find the process documented here.