ANALOG AND DIGITAL

DATA

Emmanuel Eilu

Faculty of Computing and IT

Makerere University

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Data acquisition
Data acquisition is a process of sampling real
world physical conditions and conversion of
the resulting samples into analog signals –
then to digital numeric values
The components of data acquisition systems
include:
 Transducers and sensors
• Signals
• Signal conditioning
• DAQ hardware
• Driver and application software
.

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Sources
Data acquisition begins with the physical
phenomenon to be measured. This
physical phenomenon could be the
temperature of a room, the intensity of a
light source, the pressure inside a
chamber, the force applied to an object, or
many other things.

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Sensors/Transducers
A transducer is a device that converts a
physical phenomenon into a measurable
electrical signal, such as voltage or current
 Temperature -Thermocouple, RTD, Thermistor
 Light - Photo Sensor
 Sound - Microphone
 Force and Pressure- Strain Gage Piezoelectric Transducer
 Position and Displacement -Potentiometer, LVDT, Optical
Encoder
 Acceleration -Accelerometer
 pH -pH Electrode

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Signals
The appropriate transducers convert physical
phenomena into measurable signals. Or Electric
or electromagnetic representations of data
Signals can be categorized into two groups
◦ Analog
◦ Digital

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Analog
◦ Analogue data transmission consists of
sending information over a physical
transmission medium in the form of
wave.
◦ Or is the process of taking an any form
of data and translating it into electronic
pulses.
◦ Data is transmitted via a carrier wave,
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Emmanuel Eilu (Christ is Lord)
Analog transmission: Waves
Frequency (pitch)
 How many times per second the waveform
repeats/oscillates
 Amplitude (volume)
 The maximum height
Phase/Period
 How far from the beginning of the cycle (360
degrees)

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Signal Representation
Frequency
◦ Hertz (Hz) (measure of frequency)
◦ Kilohertz (kHz) (1,000)
◦ Megahertz (MHz) (1,000,000)
◦ Gigahertz (GHz) (1,000,000,000)
◦ Audio frequencies (lowest frequencies)

12/07/21 Emmanuel Eilu (Christ is Lord)

Digital
◦ Involves breaking the signal into a
binary format where the audio or video
data is represented by a series of "1"s
and "0"s. Discrete values

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In digital technology, the analogue wave
is sampled at some interval, and then
turned into binaries that are stored in the
digital device.
Each dot in the figure above represents
one audio sample.
◦ On a CD, the sampling rate is 44,000 samples
per second. So on a CD, there are 44,000
numbers stored per second of music

Emmanuel Eilu (Christ is Lord)

An ADC is an electronic device that
converts an input analog voltage (or current
or electronic impulse) to a digital number
( converts continuous signals to discrete
digital numbers.)
DAC is a device for converting a digital
(usually binary) code to an analog signal
(current, voltage or electric impulse).

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There are two factors that determine the quality
of a digital recording
◦ Sample rate
 The rate at which the samples are captured or played back,
measured in Hertz (Hz), or samples per second. An audio
CD has a sample rate of 44,100 Hz, often written as 44 KHz
for short
◦ Sample format or sample size
 This is the number of digits in the digital representation of
each sample.
 An audio CD has a precision of 16 bits, which corresponds
to about 5 decimal digits.

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Digital information can be transmitted or
stored in a variety of different formats e.g
computer hard disc, mini-disc, CD, digital
tape, DVD etc, etc.).

Emmanuel Eilu (Christ is Lord)