A Computer Based System for Data Acquisition and Control of Scientific Experiments on Remote Platforms

The observation and measurement of environmental processes is made simple and economical using a minicomputer based system which controls activities and logs data from a remote unattended platform by 20 000 baud, digital, cable telemetry. The remote station electronics is bus oriented and provides A/D and D/A conversion, logical input/output and servo motor control. The minicomputer, an Interdata 74 with only 16K-byte core, houses a novel, real time, multi-tasking operating system featuring an interpretive language called REMCODE. One version of this system operates a submersible water quality analyzer which connects, via the dialed telephone network, to a central computer for real time data retrieval and remote reprogramming. Another version samples 48 analog plus 6 digital inputs at rates up to 20 Hz, from a tower in Lake Ontario and logs them onto computer-compatible magnetic tape.