Hardware and software to design continuous data logger used in marine controllable pitch propeller operation

As one of the major propulsion plants of marine system, the controllable pitch propeller (CPP) has been widely applied in dynamic systems of a variety of ships at present. Both the operations on CPP from crew and the CPP's actual working state are closely related to safe and successful navigations. Aiming at this fact, a novel data logger based on embedded platform and field bus was designed and developed, which can meet the requirements of long-playing, online, continuous collecting and recording the information of operator's commands on CPP and CPP's working state with the actual time. These data that could be read and analyzed by authorized staff when necessary can provide convincing evidence for accident analysis and equipment maintenance. A practical data cache technology and power-down data integrity protection mechanism are also mentioned in this article. The test results indicated that this data logger, which can work continuously for more than 50 days in general case if the operator does not want any data to be overwritten, has high reliability and great practical value.