Ringdale USB - 4 x analogue and 16 x digital input controller

The AD-416, an HID compliant input controller. provides analogue inputs that can be jumpered for differential, 4 to 20mA or 0 to 5V inputs. A thermistor at the terminals of the analogue inputs allows accurate measurement of temperature using thermocouples. Its maximum acquisition rate is 8ms and the device reads all inputs simultaneously including the analogue inputs. According to Ringdale, the supply voltage for the board can be in a wide range of 8-60V dc input with polarity protection and extremely low power consumption. Utility and programming instructions for inclusion into a C++ or VB environment are available from the Ringdale website. The utility programme can read the value of each port and log the data to an MS Access or SQL database. The input controller allows daisy chaining of up to eight devices or daisy chains with a Ringdale USB relay board, meaning the first device is connected to the pc or the Ringdale access controller, the second device's USB slave I/O is connected to the first device's daisy chain USB host I/O, the third device's USB slave I/O to the second device USB host I/O and so on. The extremely low power consumption of the device allows solar operated data collection to be realised using this device.