ANY-maze Help > The ANY-maze reference > The I/O page > Making I/O connections > Connecting voltage inputs from other equipment

Connecting voltage inputs from other equipment

Details

Many devices output a voltage to represent some value that they are detecting. For example, the CWE CapStar-100 analyses CO2 levels and outputs 0 volts for 0% CO2 and 1 volt for 10% CO2. Alternatively a sound level meter might output 0.3 volts for 30 decibel sound and 1.3 volts for 130 decibels. Some telemetry systems also output a voltage representing whatever the telemetered sensor is detecting, for example, blood pressure or biopotentials.

You can connect these sorts of devices to an ANY-maze Analogue interface, allowing ANY-maze itself to read their values - thus the system would be able to determine CO2 concentrations, sound levels, or the animal's blood pressure, during a test (and don't forget that this information could be analysed for different zones and across time).

Voltage outputs of this type connect to the ANY-maze Analogue interface input ports. These ports use screw terminal blocks and you should connect the voltage signal to pin 1 and the ground to pin 2.

After making these connections, you will need to Configure the ANY-maze Analogue interface to tell it two things: the range of voltages it can expect at the input and the sampling rate it should use. You should choose a voltage range which just covers all the expected values - for example, in the case of the CO2 detector described above a voltage range of 0-3V would be good (the device having a maximum voltage of 1V). The sampling rate determines how often the ANY-maze interface will read the voltage and this will very much depend on how quickly the value can change. For example, for CO2 detection a rate of 10 samples per second would probably be more than adequate, but for sound levels, which could change very quickly, you might want to sample at 100 samples per second. Note that higher sampling rates generate more data (and hence larger files), so avoid using a rate that's unnecessarily high.

After configuring the port you should test that it is working correctly using the I/O page, where you'd want to select the relevant ANY-maze Analogue interface's Analogue input ports. This will display a chart showing the voltage being read from the port.

To actually use the voltage data, you'll need to add a signal input to your protocol. Here you will find that you can specify conversion data, which means that ANY-maze will then report the actual value the voltage represents (such as % CO2 ) rather than the voltage itself.

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ANY-maze help topic T0914