A Fully Programmable DAQ Board of Vibrational Signals from IEPE Sensors: Hardware and Software Design, Performance Analysis

Abstract

Vibration analysis is commonly used to assess machinery conditions, earthquake detection, and structural monitoring. Commercially available DAQs (Data Acquisition Systems) feature high costs and limited versatility in terms of end-user hardware/firmware customization, making it difficult to adapt them to the input signal features and add supplementary functionalities. Hence, this research aims to develop a custom acquisition board for detecting vibration signals via IEPE (Integrated Electronic Piezoelectric) sensors, considering the limitations of commercially available systems, and building upon solutions found in the literature. The DAQ board was intended for remote vibration monitoring of infrastructure and machinery for industrial applications, allowing the implementation of predictive maintenance strategies. The proposed DAQ board has two independent and fully configurable channels, which can be set for acquiring signals from IEPE sensors or generic voltage sources. The DAQ board relies on the STM32F401 microcontroller to manage the acquisition from high-speed ADCs, process data, and store them in mass memory (SD card). During acquisition, the DAQ implements a batch acquisition strategy based on a buffer flash memory for temporarily storing ADCs data, which are iteratively poured into mass memory. Also, the board has Bluetooth connectivity to transmit acquired data and receive commands remotely. A prototype of the DAQ board was developed and tested with several waveforms, including vibration signals. The tests showed that the board can acquire vibration signals and compute the FFT onboard. The DAQ demonstrated a good balance between performance, accuracy, flexibility, and cost, making it suitable for several industrial applications and allowing for scalability and integration potential.

Hardware and Software Design of Programmable Medium and High-Speed Data Acquisition (DAQ) Board of Fiber Optic Signal for Partial Discharge Acquisition

“…However, the sampling rate of the acquisition board is also at a low-speed level, which can only satisfy the general civilian measurement requirement and has significant room for improvement. In 2024, Roberto De Fazio and others designed a vibration signal acquisition platform using STM32F4 MCU and external ADCs [16], but it only has two channels and cannot satisfy the multi-channel signal acquisition requirement. All of the above mainstream acquisition boards are designed for voltage signals.…”

“…In this paper, 12-bit acquisition is used to meet the fiber signal demodulation requirements. Without oversampling, the signal-to-noise ratio of the quantized ADC can be calculated by Formula (16).…”