This site is dedicated to USB based PC based instrumentation products and software. Whilst there are many add-on instrumentation products currently available for PCs and Notebooks in the market, many of these are outdated in that they usually interface to a legacy PC parallel printer port. Often, these legacy ports are no longer included as standard on PCs and notebooks, leaving USB as the only viable connection technology for connecting external peripherals.
Using USB has many advantages over legacy printer and serial ports. It fully supports Plug and Play so that the peripheral/instrument is immediately recognised and configured on plugging in. It is easy to expand the number of USB ports available by adding USB hubs which are readily available at low cost. USB provides up to 500mA of current to the peripheral which can often be used to power the instrument, eliminating the need for and external PSU. USB is fast and allows for a cable length of up to 5m between the instrument and the PC.
We publish the software interfaces to our products, so that vendors can adapt the hardware for their own application area using LabVIEW, Visual Basic, Delphi/C++ Builder and other visual programming languages. This information will be published on our
Interfacing Page and 3rd party code samples and contributions would be most welcome. Information on 3rd party suppliers of software components for use in Instrumentation applications can be found on our
Resources page.
