Inexpensive Digital Strip Chart Recorder

I would agree...I am surprised that in today's world of electronics that an inexpensive turnkey appliance is not available.

The uses for something like this is many....and I am not trying to be specific since this will be used to measure a number of physical parameters.

Let's say one wants a digital solution to what a old HP 680 Strip Chart Recorder would work for...is there anything out there today that works the same?

TMT

Inexpensive and "strip chart recorder" are mutually exclusive.

Yes, there are lots of addons, google gets tons of hits "

The next question is: "how much do you want to spend ?? "

Portable, USB, serial, .... lots of questions.

What are you trying to measure will determine what kind of analog data recorder to buy.

donald

OK,

So the spec's are: not battery operated and must weight in at about 15 pounds. ;-)

I have used some of the smaller devices at :

There will be trade offs on "chart speed" = sample rate and resolution (step size) and max input voltage.

good luck

donald

I don't know if the software is available, separately, but for $25 you can buy a 4 channel analog digitizer that comes with such software.

Radio Shack used to sell a Metex VOM (Metex ME-11) that had a serial port output and software that made essentially a data logger which you could then pop into an excel or Quattro spreadsheet and massage the data anyway you liked. I bought two of them from their on-line catalog when they were on sale maybe 3 years ago, suspect you can still find them, maybe with an USB port these days. I use one of mine for metering the transmitted signal from NAA to detect SIDS. Lots more practical than my old Rustrak strip chart recorder, I can just throw away the "uninteresting" data and not use any paper at all. The other one is just a backup for my Fluke 77.

W4ZCB

Check out

Farnell stocked some of their gear when I last looked.

Something like the USB-1208LS from Measurement Computing (I'd post a link but their referral/tag/cookie system seems to want two or three lines for the URL) plus an old laptop PC might do the trick.

It's a relatively inexpensive USB gadget that comes with basic "strip chart" software as a demo app. They have other, faster, and more expensive models and more software, of course. IIRC, they still include their Universal Library w/ the device, so you can write your own apps with your own look & feel.

Higher end stuff is available from places like

Has anyone checked Omega ?

Sure

Look For Data loggers.

DataQ makes some cheap ones

"Round Robin Database Tool" - RRDTool - can possibly be hacked into submission:

Omega OM-EL-USB

USB data logger, stand-alone, temperature, temp/RH, voltage, or current, about $60

OM-PL series, $115 with more options

Independent datalogger that is connected to your computer via USB. Program it and download data from it. About 99 bucks.

Al

While a paper strip recorder might have seemed a good idea back in its day, actually using one in this day and age would be a rather obvious waste of paper. The kind of device you're looking for is called a storage oscilloscope or data logger, these days, mostly depending on its typical sampling rate and number of channels.

Any computer or PDA with decent sound hardware should suffice for a working, no-cost, software-only approach. Just connect your analog input to line-in (adapt level and impedance as needed), and record your signal as an audio stream, which you can later transform into whatever kind of plot or display you like. It won't be spectacularly accurate, granted, but it'll still outperform a paper strip plotter on all practical counts.

I've used