Welcome to the OpenDAQ discussion site. OpenDAQ is the start of a community of users that have an interest in helping to create a hardware/software platform that focuses on data acquisition tasks and problems.
Although measuring analog signals and converting them into digital format has been around for decades, it has largely been ignored by the open source community. Yet Data Acquisition (DAQ) surrounds us every day. Your cell phone, your car, your tablet all perform DAQ tasks.
DAQ can be implemented in many different ways. Most often some sort of DAQ instrument and software combination is purchased and configured by the user to perform specific DAQ tasks. These systems often are geared toward making a single sort of DAQ measurement, such as measuring a voltage. But making other kinds of DAQ measurements, such as temperature, require an entirely different instrument, or at the very least, an add-on option to a base DAQ system.
DAQ instruments and hardware run the gamut from simple $100 boxes with limited performance, to $muti-thousand systems that offer superior performance and durability. Flexibility, however, is either difficult to find, difficult to implement, costly, or some combination of the three.
OpenDAQ attempts to address limitations with current DAQ offerings by approaching DAQ from a novel direction. Some of the OpenDAQ concepts include:
- Open hardware
- Open software (and firmware)
- Hardware modularity
- Hardware abstraction
- Flexible cost/performance balance
- Off-the-shelf hardware modules
- Off-the-shelf DAQ systems
Off-the-shelf hardware and systems are future offerings that will be based on ultimate architecture choices that will, in part, be co-designed by the OpenDAQ community.
Currently we are working to spread the word, and add users to the community. In addition, new articles will be written to better define OpenDAQ concepts, as well as to convey design decisions that have already been made. We will discuss the logic behind each of the concepts and decisions, and elicit feedback.
We hope to arrive at OpenDAQ specifications that will drive the design of hardware, software and firmware modules which will become the basis for the official OpenDAQ content.
Data Acquisition is used more and more every day for consumer, commercial, and research applications. We at OpenDAQ.org wish to pull back the curtain, share how DAQ can be done well, and give the user the final option of going totally on their own, implementing a solution with OpenDAQ hardware/software/firmware modules, or purchasing a flexible OpenDAQ system.
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