Windmill 6: Data Acquisition Software Suite
This suite of software lets you interface USB, Ethernet, GPIB, Modbus, RS485, RS422 and RS232 devices to the PC. It includes logging, charting, display and control applications, and any one communications driver.
Price: 145 GB pounds.
Features
- Easy-to-use: no programming required
- Free technical support for life by e-mail, fax or telephone
- Log data: temperature, strain, pressure, position, voltage, current, flow, humidity, rainfall, concentration, etc.
- Chart data in real-time
- Switch digital outputs
- Control analogue outputs
- Alarm indication on all inputs
- Route data into Excel, or other Windows software, in real-time
- Add optional extras as the need arises: process mimics, alarm alerts by telephone, sequence control, remote monitoring over the Internet, etc
- Price includes any one hardware driver
- Define and save libraries of hardware configuration files. These include information like names of channels, input range for each channel, engineering units for each channel and alarm settings for each channel
- Sampling rates variable from less than once per hour up to 10 samples per second per channel.
- Can log 200 samples per second from 20 or more channels.
Truly Modular
Each Windmill program concentrates on doing a single job and you simply run as many programs as you need. You can run several copies of each program, which means there are no fixed limits to the size of a Windmill system. Windmill programs include logging, charting, process mimics, alarm logging, PID control, sequence control and ActiveX programming tools.
The Windmill Chart program
There are various styles of chart, simply selected by push-buttons: separated or super-imposed traces; grid-lines on or off; choice of pen colour for each channel; black or white background; alarm indication; and so on. You can vary the speed so the window displays just the last few seconds in detail, or shows the trends over several hours. To see short- and long-term trends just open two instances of Chart.
Hardware Independent
All the equipment monitored by Windmill is configured with one program: SetupIML. This lets you select channels, give them names, specify linearisation and scaling to your chosen engineering units, and so on.
SetupIML scans the connected hardware and creates a complete default set-up to get you started. When you edit this set-up the menus and dialogues show only those options available with your hardware, so you cannot go wrong.
All the details are stored in files and you can create a library of files for different procedures. Your chosen channel names and details are used consistently throughout the Windmill system, even when data is exported to other applications.
Minimum System Requirements
- 486 processor
- 8 MB RAM
- VGA Graphics
- Microsoft Windows XP, 2000, 98, NT, 95 or later