With the rise of mobile and portable data acquisition applications, being tethered to a desktop system is becoming inconvenient and less acceptable as the industry moves forward. You can do so much on mobile and tablet devices nowadays, so why not use them for your data acquisition application? To give you the option of setting up and controlling your DAQ application from your Android device, MCC developed a version of the Universal Library (UL) API for Android. With this API, you can create custom data acquisition apps on Android 3.1 devices and later.
The steps are easy to follow and explained in our article – “5 Steps to Creating and Deploying AndroidTM Data Acquisition Apps”. We’ve also put together various examples to get you up and running quickly! Just compile the examples into downloadable apps or install some of the pre-compiled apps on Google Play.
To showcase the mobile power of this platform, one of our engineers put together an example of using an Android mini PC to acquire data from a wireless Measurement Computing data acquisition device, the BTH-1208LS. Never heard of a mini PC? It’s a tiny stick computer that almost looks like it could be a USB flash drive, and it contains a quad-core processor, 2GB of memory, an Android OS, and costs less than $80. Talk about a compact controller for your application! Check out the video of this demo on our YouTube channel.
Let us know your thoughts on mobile data acquisition and using the Android platform for DAQ applications in the comments below. Have you had any success or challenges implementing mobile apps into your projects?
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