Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Basics
- 2 Radiation
- 3 Temperature
- 4 Humidity
- 5 Wind
- 6 Barometric pressure
- 7 Evaporation
- 8 Precipitation
- 9 Soil moisture and groundwater
- 10 Rivers and lakes
- 11 Data logging
- 12 Telemetry
- 13 Visibility
- 14 Clouds
- 15 Lightning
- 16 The upper atmosphere
- 17 The oceans
- 18 Cold regions
- 19 Remote sensing
- 20 Atmospheric composition
- 21 Forward look
- Appendix: abbreviations and acronyms
- Index
- References
11 - Data logging
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 July 2014
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Basics
- 2 Radiation
- 3 Temperature
- 4 Humidity
- 5 Wind
- 6 Barometric pressure
- 7 Evaporation
- 8 Precipitation
- 9 Soil moisture and groundwater
- 10 Rivers and lakes
- 11 Data logging
- 12 Telemetry
- 13 Visibility
- 14 Clouds
- 15 Lightning
- 16 The upper atmosphere
- 17 The oceans
- 18 Cold regions
- 19 Remote sensing
- 20 Atmospheric composition
- 21 Forward look
- Appendix: abbreviations and acronyms
- Index
- References
Summary
He who first shortened the labour of copyists by the device of Movable Types was disbanding hired armies, and cashiering most Kings and Senates, and creating a whole new democratic world: he had invented the art of printing.
Thomas Carlyle Sartor Resartus.Before the development of modern data loggers in the 1960s, the only means of automatically recording measurements of the environment was on paper charts, either mechanically or on electrical strip-chart recorders with electrical sensors. It was the arrival of solid-state electronics, in particular its ability to operate digitally, that enabled computers and data loggers to be developed. Both have greatly enhanced the way in which the natural environment can be measured, indeed they have revolutionised it.
The construction of a data logger
The schematic of Fig. 11.1 shows each main section of a data logger. With the development of large-scale integration on one integrated circuit (IC) chip, and of the microprocessor, many of these functions are now carried out on a single IC, supported by a range of peripheral chips such as serial data communicators, memory access controllers, counters and clocks (Fig. 11.2), although even many of these are now on one single chip. However, to explain the functioning of a logger, it is useful to keep the boxes separate. Indeed they were, in reality, physically separate until the development of the larger ICs in the 1980s, the first loggers using individual transistors, resistors and capacitors with wires interconnecting them.
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- Measuring the Natural Environment , pp. 272 - 287Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2003