Anasazi Instruments has been producing high resolution magnetic resonance instruments since 1995 primarily for the higher education market as well as industry and government labs. In a recent effort to upgrade their spectrometers, Anasazi worked with Measurement Computing to replace the PCI ADC and Digital I/O cards in their instruments with a USB-based interface. I reached out to Gregory Quinting, Ph.D and Thomas Ferris, Ph.D from Anasazi to learn more about this project.
What brought on the need to upgrade your spectrometers?
“Key attributes of our product are its reliability, low cost of ownership and ease of use. We were then increasingly concerned in recent years as we faced more difficulty in finding Windows PCs that would function reliably with our PCI-based ADC. BSOD messages and reboots would occur at alarming frequency as the operator would commence a data acquisition. We needed to replace the PCI ADC and digital I/O cards and their drivers with a reliable USB interface.”
Why did you choose MCC’s USB-1608FS-Plus?
“Magnetic resonance, including MRI, has long had stringent requirements for high precision data acquisition, including low jitter sampling rates of 400kHz or higher and at least 16-bit word size. The USB-1608FS-Plus not only gave us the USB connectivity we needed; it also included a robust suite of software, thus lifting the burden of our needing to design and implement our own software such as device drivers and libraries. This dramatically shortened the time-to-market and reduced the development cost of the USB upgrade.”
Any additional comments?
“Measurement Computing’s support staff proved quite valuable in helping us put together a way for our customers to install the software in a seamless way. MCC’s technical help even on details such as finding a connector to interface to the digital I/O board of our design was especially valuable.”
I always love to hear when customers have positive experiences with our engineers! You can learn more about Anasazi Instruments and their NMR Spectrometers by visiting their website, http://aiinmr.com.
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