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Jul. / Aug. 1999
 

Advantech ActiveDAQ Meets Your Driver Programming Needs for Ease, Performance, and Flexibility

If you are still struggling to program your data acquisition devices through function calls and passing parameters, you owe it to yourself to try Advantech ActiveDAQ controls.
Advantech ActiveDAQ is a collection of 32-bit ActiveX controls that perform analog, digital and timing I/O op-erations for a wide variety of Advantech's data acquisition and control hardware. ActiveDAQ enables you to control your data acquisition devices simply by setting properties and thereby avoiding the frustration of low-level programming. You can now develop your DAQ application in your favorite programming environment and enjoy the benefits of rapid ap-plication development without sacrificing ease of use or pro-gram performance. Advantech ActiveDAQ resolves your driver programming needs for ease of use, high performance and flexibility. ActiveDAQ is now shipping.

ActiveX Control Technology for All Major Development Environments

Advantech ActiveDAQ leverages Microsoft's ActiveX con-trol technology to provide DAQ functions for Advantech hard-ware. It can be used in any develop-ment environment that supports ActiveX controls, including Microsoft Visual Basic, Visual C++ and Microsoft Office applications, Borland Delphi and C++ Builder and even dedicated indus-trial automation software tools likeLabVIEW and HP VEE. Since ActiveX controls are based upon Microsoft's popular Component Object Model (COM), the number of development environments that support them will increase in the future. ActiveDAQ com-bines the power and flexibility of indus-try- standard development tools with DAQ functions. You can leverage your existing investment and expertise in your favorite development tool to eas-ily build DAQ applications.

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Configure Your DAQ Operations Through Property Pages

Unlike DLL drivers, ActiveDAQ is tightly integrated with industry-stan-dard visual development tools. ActiveDAQ integrates seamlessly with your development environment. You can use a property page interface for configuring I/O devices. Events signal hardware status and methods control DAQ operations. ActiveDAQ also takes advantage of the many time-sav-ing features of visual development tools, including automatic code completion and the object browser. The intuitive ActiveDAQ controls give you a familiar interface and many DAQ ap-plications can be finished without con-sulting the manual.

Event-driven Architecture to Enhance Program Performance

In traditional data acquisition program-ming, the status of I/O operations are checked by polling the hardware. This is time-consuming and continual poll-ing causes inefficiencies in the program code. Advantech ActiveDAQ controls use an event-driven mechanism and will notify your program by executing event routines when events occur in the device. Programmers only have to code the actions in response to the event routines and no longer have to manually check the hardware status. ActiveDAQ controls support the follow-ing events:

  • I/O operation is completed or termi-nated
  • The buffer for analog input data is being used up
  • The state of digital input changes in hardware that supports the DI inter-rupt function
  • The analog input value exceeds pre-defined alarm limits
    ActiveDAQ provides more efficient program control and improves the over-all performance of the program

Supported I/O Hardware

ActiveDAQ supports the following Advantech I/O products:

  • PCI I/O cards: PCI-1710 / 1713 / 1720 / 1750 / 1751 / 1760
  • ISA I/O cards: PCL-818 series / 1800 / 816 / 812PG / 711B / 813B / 726 / 727 / 728 / 725 / 730 / 722 / 724 / 731 / 733 / 734 / 735 / 833 / 720 / 721 / 723 / 836
  • ADAM-4000 series remote data ac-quisition modules
  • ADAM-5000 series remote data ac-quisition modules
  • MIC-2000 I/O cards: MIC-2718 / 2728 / 2730 / 2732 / 2750 / 2752 / 2760
  • PCM series I/O cards: PCM-3718 / 3724

Functions Supported by ActiveDAQ

Advantech ActiveDAQ provides eight ActiveX controls for I/O operations:

  • DAQAI control: Single data reading, waveform data reading and tempera-ture measurement.
  • DAQAO control: Single point analog output and waveform analog output.
  • DAQDI control: Single point digital input, waveform digital input and digi-tal input with hardware interrupt.
  • DAQDO control: Single point digital output
  • DAQCounter control: Event-counting or frequency measurement.
  • DAQPulse control: Pulse output op-erations.
  • DAQAlarm control: Determines whether the input value exceeds the pre-defined alarm limits, and sends the alarm event.
  • DAQDevice control: Device selec-tion operation.

Controlling Your Data Acquisition Devices Through Four Easy Steps

Step 1: Select the ActiveDAQ control
Add the ActiveDAQ control that you want to use in your application to your project.

Step 2: Configure the ActiveDAQ control
Configure the component through the property sheet.

Step 3: Write a code for event routines
Develop a code for event routines in response to some occurrence in the component.

Step 4: Run the program
Execute the program to test your code.

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