I use a variety of data acquisition techniques, but sometimes quick and dirty is the way to go. When I recently needed to capture 1 variable to tune a scoring algorithm for an electronic game I am developing, I decided the best way to get usable data was to do experiments using the actual prototype device’s sensors and hardware. In the past I have used a Parallax BS2 homework board with their PLX-DAQ program. PLX-DAQ allows a simple method to dump data directly into Microsoft Excel. This is great because it required much less work to setup and was going to result in a real world, immediately useful data-set compared to using my USB DAQ device with Lavbiew. I used a USB<->RS232 cable to connect my hardware.

I do not use much Parallax hardware anymore and have been building my prototypes using Mikroelectronica’s MikroBASIC Pro and their awesome ‘EasyPIC5′ Development board. Porting the .BS2 PBASIC code to work within  MikroBASIC turned out to be a relatively simple task.

Here you can find my code, which is using the xGLCD library available from Pocketmt.com, who also make a nice GLCD font creator.

I hope someone finds this useful!

MikroBasic Pro PLX-DAQ | my MicroBASIC Pro 2009 PLX-DAQ Code