Hardware and software for a multiparametric concurrent data acquisition system

This paper presents a brief description of the basic characteristics and functioning of a simple hardware/software system for the simultaneous control of several data acquisition channels in atomic collisions experiments. The basic hardware consists of two IBM-PC/AT compatible boards equipped with ADCs, DACs, IO ports, and counters. The software allows simultaneous running of several data acquisition tasks, such as controlling an optical monochromator, an electrostatic energy analyzers and time-of-flight analyzers. The software also allows basic file input/output functions as well as some data processing functions.