Custom and practice

With many companies using data acquisition products to monitor everything from engine performance to fluid control, it is not surprising that the industry is moving forward at quite a pace.

One of the latest trends is the development of self-customisation of products by users. Increasingly, producers of data acquisition tools are moving away from building instruments tailored to a certain application or industry. Instead, manufacturers and designers are creating more universal or customisable products that allow users to make their own decisions concerning the particular data channels that need to be connected in.

This means people can choose from highly configurable, programmable technologies to decide how and what they use to gather their data. With the variety of different tasks users are requiring instruments to perform, the trend is becoming increasingly important, said Ian Bell, marketing director for National Instruments, UK and Ireland. For this reason, manufacturers are working hard to make such products easy to program and use.