Hello, Jason.

The industry within the last 5-10 years has progressed to "continuous
monitoring."  Unfortunately, the term is not well defined nor is it well
understood by those who create the specifications/requirements for product
reliability testing.  Ask the customer about continuous monitoring, the
answer is usually "Yes".  In my past life as a product reliability test
engineer, my firm was tasked (actually forced) to find a way of monitoring
possibly hundreds of input/output signals on any given product.  For obvious
reasons (money), we chose to develop a monitoring system internally.
Although the design was sound on paper, needless to say it did not meet
expectations as it was unreliable, difficult to interface, inflexible, and
time consuming to set up.

Based on my experience and the industry trend toward continuous monitoring, I
would recommend an investment in an data acquisition system.  Top-of-the-line
models should allow you the flexibility to monitor anything from a simple
0-5V digital output to the frequency of a PWM output.  Such a model will also
allow you to measure temperature, current, voltage, etc.  In addition, the
software packages have come a long way in the last decade.  A package such as
LabView for Windows makes configuration simple and data storage convenient.

I do not have a recommendation for any particular type of DAQ system.  Keep
in mind that continuous monitoring will not likely go away anytime soon.

Dave Morrow
Contamination Studies Laboratories, Inc.

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