[time-nuts] 2nd 5370B

[Poul-Henning Kamp]

In message <AANLkTikh0vv-x7Wt8w8GHejM159+aC--zZWdbX6jMZa+ at mail.gmail.com>, Bob 
Bownes writes:

>Speaking of which, I have some instruments I'd like to usb enable. The
>instruments have analog output. Ideally I'd like to use a USB
>microcontroller and simply read back the analog value. Once I have the
>analog value I can handle it from there. If someone has some
>experience doing such, please contact me offline.

What kind of precision do you need ?

Getting 10 bit of so-so ADC is totally trivial, any Arduino board
will do that for you.

Browse sparkfun.com a bit, they have tons of weird microcontroller
boards, Arduino, ARM, PIC etc, and 

Getting better resolution means a board with a dedicated ADC chip
but that is usually not a big issue either.

If you _really_ need precision, check out analog.com for eval
boards for their ADCs, some of those have USB ports these days.

If you want something more streamlined, there are a lot of
ADC+USB gadgets on the market, most of them very overpriced,
but with better signal-conditioning than the raw electronics
on Arduino and some of them even calibrated to some extent.

-- 
Poul-Henning Kamp       | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20
phk at FreeBSD.ORG         | TCP/IP since RFC 956
FreeBSD committer       | BSD since 4.3-tahoe    
Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.