instrumentation notes - A USB-Enabled, FLASH-Disk-Based Data Logger

A data logger is a device for measuring and storing data. It is an all-purpose piece of measurement equipment that finds use in an extremely wide range of applications. In principle, a data logger is a relatively simple piece of equipment; as always, the devil is in the details. A well-constructed data logger should be a joy to work with; a poorly designed data logger can easily drive an engineer to tears. Data loggers, in one form or another, have existed for many years. In this article, we describe a reasonably easy to implement data logger that makes measurements using a microcontroller's on-chip analog-to-digital converter (ADC) and makes use of two rather new technologies. Our data logger stores data on a removable FLASH disk, and it knows how to communicate with a computer using the universal serial bus (USB) standard