Monarch Instrument DC 2000 - Manual (Page 41)

Chapter 3 Getting Started
Page 3-11
3.4 Getting to the Points
The Instrument is a 15 point recorder of which up to 6 channels may be direct or real world inputs. These are
typically voltages or currents. Any channel not being used to record or display live inputs may be used as a
computational channel. Inputs can be conditioned or scaled to display any range of engineering units. Refer to
Figure 3-13 below.
There are four distinct levels of data handling, namely conversion, conditioning, scaling and display/record. Conver-
sion applies only to live inputs and is the process of converting real world analog signals into a 16-bit digital value
that can be used by the Recorder. There are five full-scale ranges for all conversions, 150 milliVolts, 1.25 V, 2.5 V,
12.5 V, 25V, and DC. The converted values pass to a conditioning block which converts the binary value which is
effectively a percentage of full scale, into a value useful to the user. Conditioning includes converting the binary
value into a representative voltage, conditioning and linearizing this voltage to represent for example, a real world
temperature as might be input by a thermocouple or RTD, and applying any other computation as required. The
conditioning block handles 15 channels. The outputs from the conditioning block are referred to as base points
and may be fed back to the inputs of the conditioning block to form the basis (base point) for other base point
computations. This includes tracking peak or valley values, doing moving averages, timed averages, difference,
totalization or any other user-entered equation.
Figure 3-13 Data Flow