A data acquisition system for autoanalyzers
Rene R. Diocares, Ruby U. Castro · Communications in Soil Science and Plant Analysis · 1990
To enable the IRRI Analytical Service Laboratories (ASL) to meet the demand for fast delivery of high‐quality analytical services, we designed a system that would allow “time‐critical”; analog data to be captured simultaneously from four Technicon AutoAnalyzer colorimeters and processed by one computer. The system was configured around a Mitac MPC 3100–2 IBM PC‐compatible computer with an AT bus and an Intel 80386 CPU. An analog‐to‐digital converter was installed in the computer to convert the voltage signals to digital information. Software Link's PC‐MOS/386 Operating System was used as the multitasking environment. The programs for both data logging and data processing were tailored to the requirements of the ASL using Borland's Turbo Basic. The PC‐MOS/386 environment allows data logging at constant intervals as a background operation and real‐time data processing in one channel in the foreground partition. The data processing program requires user interaction to verify calibration parameters and detect and label peaks. Data obtained and processed by the system agreed closely with the data calculated from peak heights read visually from the recorder chart.