Amplicon Liveline has designed and manufactured the new PCI215 bus Data Acquisition Board, featuring 48 channels of digital I/O and six 16 bit, 10MHz counter timers, in addition to the latest PLX 9052 bridge chip to maximise the price/performance ratio. This new board is an upgrade of the popular ISA bus PC214E and C215E boards and is fully backward compatible, with identical connection cables and terminations. End users are also able to use programs developed on ISA bus and recompile them for use with this new PCI bus version.
The high performance, easy-to-use device has the added advantage of being low cost.
It is supplied with compatible drivers for Windows 95/98 and NT/2000, and software examples are available in Agilent VEE Pro, Visual Basic and Delphi.
The PCI215 features two programmable peripheral interface (PPI) chips, and two counter timers.
Every timing operation is under the control of an on-board 10MHz crystal clock source.
Operating from a 5V supply from the host PC bus, the device runs at 220mA or up to 300mA if all 48DIO channels are loaded.
The Amplicon library used helps to increase control over the PPI and counter timers, as it has 8 DIO specific functions and 44 counter/timer functions, in addition to 29 generic functions used to set up the board and collect information about the PC.
Primarily used for up and down counting purposes, the DIO can also be used to trigger start and stop counting or even for batch counting.
This is particularly useful for signalling systems, in research and development, education, with system integrators, general manufacturing, manufacturers of electronic instruments, and for defence and aerospace, and in telecommunications applications.
The device is part of the well-established 200 series of data acquisition and serial communications boards on offer from Amplicon, which include the complete range of PCI bus boards for DIO, counter timers, relay output, analogue input/output and multifunction boards.
The PCI215 has been tested for full compliance with EMC directives and is CE marked.
Full pre and post sales technical support is available free of charge from the company, should the end-user run into any difficulties.