Wireless on the Horizon for Data Acquisition?

Wireless is everywhere. According to market intelligence firm iSuppli Corporation, total mobile phone shipments in 2007 surpassed 1 billion and are projected to increase to 1.47 billion by 2010. In just a few years, wireless devices have become more pervasive than the PC. The use of wireless for data acquisition, however, has been slower to materialize. Instead, the predominant trend over the past several years has been for data acquisition devices to move outside the PC via cabled buses such as USB. The ease of use, increased flexibility, and portability of these cabled devices has driven their popularity – especially as laptop adoption has surpassed that of desktop PCs. Wireless offers the prospect of taking this flexibility and portability a giant step forward by offering measurements in places where cables are not convenient or feasible, such as in environmental or remote asset monitoring applications.

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You can add wireless access points, such as the NI WAP-37x1, to Ethernet-based programmable automation controllers, such as NI CompactRIO, to implement a wireless measurement and control system.

Several factors including ease of use, security and reliability concerns, a lack of standards, and integration challenges have limited the broad adoption of wireless in data acquisition applications. Most wireless data acquisition systems on the market today use vendor-defined proprietary protocols and software, which make them difficult to set up and even more difficult to integrate with existing hardware and software. As Wi-Fi (IEEE 802.11) and ZigBee (based on IEEE 802.15.4) emerge as the predominant standards for high data rate and low-power wireless applications, respectively, integration between hardware from multiple vendors and industry-standard software, including NI LabVIEW, will become easier to implement. The analysis and visualization capabilities of LabVIEW make it an ideal environment to aggregate and display data from a network of distributed wireless devices. Additionally, many wireless sensor node vendors now offer LabVIEW drivers. Wireless technology is ripe for usage in data acquisition applications, and LabVIEW ensures seamless integration as this trend advances.

Learn more about wireless technology, testing, and products.

This article first appeared in the Q2 2008 issue of Instrumentation Newsletter.

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