Design and realisation of a wireless data acquisition system for vibration measurements

Nowadays, sensing, processing, and analysing of vibration signals are key components to structural health monitoring systems. Wireless-based data acquisition (DAQ) systems for vibration measurements become more and more important in the sensing and processing field. This paper presents a hardware and software design of wireless data acquisition system for this purpose. The proposed wireless DAQ system is based on the TMS320 digital signal processor which enables us to process real-time vibration signals. Sensitivity is one of the key performance features in the DAQ system, and we use an integrated circuit piezoelectric (ICP) accelerometer as a detection sensor for best performance. For faster wireless transmission of large amount of acceleration signals, a new data link protocol of Bluetooth interface between wireless DAQ and smartphone is proposed. An Android smartphone is a good choice of user interface in the mobile data acquisition system. In order to display vibration signals in real time at the Android smartphone, a commercial Java graphic library tool is used.