Wish to monitor battery voltage during charging over 24 hours

[treez]

Which software packages are available for me to do the above?

I only know of Labview...but the cheapest version costs £795.
Are there any cheaper data acquisition softwares?

 

[ard]

What's the hardware you'd be using? If it has memory and a UART you could simply send the data to a terminal emulator, and copy/paste the data into Excel.

 

[treez]

it'd just be a bench voltmeter.

 

[ard]

Does it have a serial port?

 

[treez]

no, but it has a gpib port.

 

[ard]

Well, then I don't know of a cheap way to get your data into a PC: gpib to rs232 boxes are expensive. Why use the multimeter at all? Why not simply use a microcontroller with adc and an UART?
You could then either spit out the adc values directly in real-time to the pc or write them to the micocontrollers eeprom.

 

[dick_freebird]

I have one Radio Shack multimeter which came with a
RS-232 port on the butt and datalogging software on
CD. I think I got it on sale for $39 or so. You'd need a
serial port equipped PC or laptop (or a cheap USB-serial
dongle).

 

[betwixt]

Treez - I've got a free-standing GPIB to RS232 converter and several stackable GPIB cables here if they are of any use to you. They have been collecting dust for 10 years so I guess I'll never use them again.

My solution to this problem would be a small PIC with ADC and a MAX232. The software would be very simple as long as you don't need too many samples over the 24 hours. If you do need a lot, an external RAM wouldn't complicate things that much.

Brian.

 

[ard]

My solution to this problem would be a small PIC with ADC and a MAX232. The software would be very simple as long as you don't need too many samples over the 24 hours. If you do need a lot, an external RAM wouldn't complicate things that much.

Absolutely what I had in mind. Or you could choose a pic with a USB interface and make your project current.