July 2, 2002
Toro moves to full production, ships to customers. Performance benchmarks exceed expectations.
Toro, our award-winning 64-bit PCI DSP card with sixteen 16-bit analog I/O channels at 250kS/s, has now entered full swing production with revision B and has been implemented in our first customers systems. Analog performance benchmarks have far exceeded expectations! System level A/D signal to noise exceeds 87dB while D/As are above 88dB with SFDR beyond 82dB. The Pismo software package, included with each Toro DevPack, supports all features of the card. This tool suite represents valuable time-savings for system developers with its target and host side example programs demonstrating sophisticated data acquisition modes, closed-loop low latency control tasks and numerous peripheral operation modes
Toro's early applications: a practical solution to new challenges in diverse industries.
The initial fields of application of Toro serve several industries and indicate that Toro is well equipped to take on the most difficult jobs. The combination of multiple, low latency, analog channels with a wide range of digital I/O tightly integrated around a fast DSP make it the perfect choice for sophisticated, PC-based real-time multi-task control. Here is just a sample of Toro's very first experiences:
ROBOT TESTING - Tactile robotics testing equipment, combining multi-axis PID closed-loop control with precisely synchronized digital output streams;
NANO-POSITIONING - Ultra-fine position control of optics using servo-control of 6 axes of magnetic bearing and linear motors using 6 high-resolution laser displacement sensor digital input and 12 DACs for current control;
MATERIAL TESTING - High-end material stress-strain test machine combining 3-axis motion control using quadrature encoders, temperature control and synchronized acquisition of stress-strain data of specimen under test
OPTICAL COMMUNICATION - Ultra-fast closed-loop position control of multiple light polarizers used on optical transmitters, with narrow spectrum photo detectors analog input.
OMNIBUS modules with FIFO buffers are enhanced with hardware over-run/under-run registers
OMNIBUS modules are mezzanine cards that provide flexible analog I/O for our data acquisition boards, Modular DSP Series and Solomente Stand-Alone DSP Series. All our FIFO-based OMNIBUS modules have now been upgraded with a FIFO full/empty flag that is a valuable end-user feature.
A FIFO (First In - First Out) buffer is a hardware device which provides data buffering between two asynchronous interfaces. Our high-speed A/D and D/A modules use FIFOs to store several consecutive samples (say on the order 256 to 64KS) between the converters and the data bus. For the acquisition, the latching of data into the FIFO is synchronous to the A/D conversion, while the transfer -or drain - of data out of the FIFO into memory or other peripherals is controlled by the DSP bus. This buffering acts as ballast and ensures no data is missed despite variation of bus utilization and overall system load.
In very demanding applications where system load is close to capacity, it is important to have visibility of an overrun condition, i.e. when the FIFO reaches a full or empty condition. This flag register can be polled by software at regular intervals to verify whether or not such a condition was encountered. This useful feature can assist in optimizing system performance and allows the programmer to make the right decision if such a condition is flagged. Existing customers are encouraged to contact our sales office to discuss FIFO flag upgrade conditions.
Real Time Solution of the Month - ChicoPlus & A4D4 OMNIBUS Module provides flexible test platform for Supercapacitors
The Supercapacitor is an emerging technology. These devices combine the energy storage capacity of batteries and the power discharge characteristics of capacitors. Lengthy charge/discharge cycling tests are performed to analyze performance and understand the impact of design, materials and fabrication processes. ChicoPlus/A4D4 provides a low cost, flexible data acquisition platform which acquires current-voltage data over time, displays data during acquisition, performs calculations on the fly and archives the data to a database. The test station consists of 2 analog channels, current and voltage. Data is processed and displayed during acquisition to show power waveform, and raw data is logged in a database.
Innovative Integration's Armada software toolset allows fast integration of all desired functions with prewritten software components for data streams, graphing and logging. These components can easily be chained together and also pass data buffers to user-written algorithms. The excellent price/performance value of the ChicoPlus DevPack makes it the perfect choice.
