Taking analogue and digital I/O subsystems simultaneously, and previously sold for $195, this add-in for Excel is now distributed at no charge
Designed to give engineers full access to the capabilities of UEI's Powerdaq analogue and digital I/O cards, Professordaq allows them to send out control signals and read back results of analogue or digital readings in a very user-friendly environment. Further, with the assistance of Visual Basic for Applications, a standard component in Excel, engineers can create sophisticated test routines based on Powerdaq hardware.
Ever since the first days of PCs, scientists and engineers have adopted spreadsheets for their own needs, typically the plotting and analysis of experimental data.
The biggest problem they've faced is getting real-world data onto a worksheet.
Manual entry is tedious and error-prone.
They've always wanted an easy-to-use, reliable method of automating the collection of real-world data into spreadsheet programs, but a method that doesn't compromise hardware performance in any way.
Overcoming that obstacle in a convenient way, Professordaq provides a seamless link between UEI's PCI- and PXI-based data-acq cards and the world's most popular spreadsheet program, Microsoft Excel. This utility, now distributed at no charge, imports individual samples or even large waveforms directly into an Excel worksheet. The utility can also use worksheet data as a source for output functions.
In addition to allowing users to assign worksheet cells to analogue and digital I/O operations, the add-in also lets them set up triggering and other control operations.
Users perform all these actions through an intuitive graphical interface that requires no programming.
In this way scientists, engineers and other experimenters can start importing data into a spreadsheet in just a few minutes without the need for any special programming skills or detailed knowledge of the data-acquisition hardware.
The product thus opens to door to automated data collection for thousands of technical professionals who don't want to devote hours to writing and debugging programs in C or learning how to connect icons in a graphical language.
They can now focus on their own work, getting results more quickly and with fewer errors than ever before. Those who adapt quickly to new technologies needn't feel hampered.
They can access all the power of Professordaq through scripts they write in VBA (Visual Basic for Applications), which is a core component of Office XP and is integrated into Excel as well as other Office applications.
VBA takes the same power available through the Visual Basic programming system and applies it to highly functional applications, enabling infinite levels of automation, customisation and integration.
Even better, Professordaq doesn't hold you back from performing any activity of which the hardware is capable.
Because the Excel screen-update rate and the underlying hardware digitisation rate are decoupled, users can digitise at the card's full rated throughput without fearing that screen updates will slow down the operation.
They can also set up Excel plots and graphs that update dynamically with the very latest data to achieve a realtime display.
Now available for free.
Professordaq is available to users of UEI's Powerdaq cards free of charge. The version of Professordaq individuals download from the web is a demo version, and to enable the full capabilities of the software they must request an authorisation key.
