High Performance Software Architectures for Remote High-Speed Data Acquisition

Abstract

There are various tools for real-time data acquisition and analysis of high-frequency signals. Usually, the tools for data acquisition and analysis are incompatible with each other, expensive, or require the utilization of various technologies. Designing a unique toolset for real-time data acquisition and analysis of high-frequency signals presents a large challenge, both in terms of hardware and software design. Some of the main challenges include fulfilling strict real-time performance requirements, using cost-effective hardware components, and designing a software architecture with minimal software latency for data sampling on an embedded platform and data analysis on a PC machine. This paper presents a software architecture design methodology for embedded platforms, including an RTOS and an Ethernet interface, along with the application architecture on the host side. To demonstrate the advantages of the proposed methodology, a prototype consisting of the STM32H747 microcontroller, FreeRTOS operating system, and a GUI application based on the Qt framework has been created. It has been shown that using the proposed architecture design methodology makes it possible to preserve the maximal hardware sampling rate utilizing a 100 Mbps Ethernet link. In the experiments, sampling rates up to 4.57 MSps for 10-bit resolution and real-time transfer of data over Ethernet link and visualization on host PC have been achieved with this specific MCU.