In this video, I’m going to show you how easy it is to configure your data acquisition
instruments, using a PC.
So what you see in front of you right now is Keysight’s BenchVue Program, and it’s
a great little program that’s free for download and use.
And it actually supports a lot of different instruments.
But the application that we’ll be using today is the data acquisition application.
And we are just going to use the basic version which allows you to configure and log data
for up to eight hours; whereas, if you purchase the full version, you can data log for as
big as your hard drive is.
So with the configuration, we’re going to go ahead and start doing that.
So I’m going to go and configure my channels.
And what I have is, I have nine different channels that are configured to measure temperature.
And I’ve already made some labels for the different channels.
Then what I did was, I configured the type of temperature sensor that I’m using, to
be a thermocouple type T sensor and just use that setting for all nine of my channels.
You can also configure different types of ranges or units on your measurement if you
would like to.
Or if you wanted to scale or adjust the readings to make them absolute zero or absolute temperature,
you can use the scaling mechanism here to adjust the readings to your expected value.
So that’s all that I’m going to configure for my channels, for now.
The other thing I want to configure is my data logging settings.
So the first thing to look at is, what do I do for starting?
So I’m just going to immediately start with the Start Button, up here.
I’m going to actually change the scan interval to maybe measure maybe once every 30 seconds,
and I’ll do that right there.
And then I want to stop data logging after one hour.
So I’ve already got that configured right here as well.
So what this is going to do is, after I press the Start Button, it’s going to scan through
all of these channels, all nine channels, and make a measurement on each channel, once
every 30 seconds.
And after an hour, it’s going to stop making those measurements.
And then we can start seeing those results on the graphic setup.
So let’s go ahead and press Start, and let it run through and make some measurements.
And we’ll take a look at this in the second part of our video.
Part 2.
So it’s been an hour now, and now I’ve gotten all of my data.
So what I want to do is, I actually want to visualize that data within my graphic setup.
So, first of all, I’ve got a strip chart set up, and I’m going to go ahead and configure
my strip chart to display a few channels.
So I’ve got channel 101, and channel 102, channel 103, and channel 104.
And then I can also do another strip chart.
So I add that, and then I can select that second strip chart to display channel 105
through channel 109.
And our strip chart is limited right now to just be up to eight different lines.
So you can autoscale all of your charts by just pressing this little Target Button, which
will give you an autoscale.
So, as you can see, the graphs are warming up, over time.
And it looks like, for the most part, it actually takes about an hour.
But to adequately temperature-characterize your unit, you actually should be testing
under load conditions.
You should be testing under different environments and ambient environments.
I just tested my room environment, which is normally about 25 degrees C. So you want to
test this at your maximum and minimum operating environments, making sure that your unit is
not going to break under those conditions as well.
So within BenchVue, now I can see my different values, making sure that there’s nothing
funny going on with those values.
I can also export all of this data, if you don’t like to use BenchVue for your data
analysis.
So you can actually export to a format such as Microsoft Excel.
And BenchVue will export that and allow you to open that up right away.
So let’s go ahead and export that.
And now, you see our different channels, so channel 101, channel 102, channel 103, channel
104, channel 105, and channel 106.
And here are timestamps for each of those readings.
And you can see that took about 142 readings over the course of an hour.
So really, that’s all it is to set up and get some measurements with BenchVue and your
data acquisition unit.