Home Forums General Discussion Technical Questions Voltage Monitor and Data Aquisition tools.

Once a long time ago there was a company called Digimetrics, who made a marvelous troubleshooting tool for intermittant faults. They were located in the Reno Nevada area.

This tool they made and sold for the princely sum of about $5000, had 64 channels. The Pods could monitor anything from 5VDC to 300 VDC and from 12VAC to 220VAC. You would hook the POD's up to points on the control and monitor.

The monitor was custom made software written by them that was a Windows interface. You would label each lead of the PODin the software. It was fast enough you could retrieve 64 channels of Data and play it back at a rate of 10 frames per second.

Was the best tool I've ever seen for troubleshooting intermittant troubles. Unfortunately TK bought them out about 12 years ago. Purchased all the inventory for NTS, (Now ITS), and promptly shut the company down...

You guys currently using anything for data logging on intermittant problems. Looking for reccomendations.

Thanks..

I have a Wurtec S3 analyser that has 16 channels hooked up to a controller that has all the functions you mentioned.

Thank you CMW007!!

Checked out the web site. Seems to be just what I'm looking for!!

http://www.wurtec.com/pdf/s3apg14-15.pdf

I bought my S3 analyzer about 3 years ago. It's bailed me out a few times on tough intermittent problems. Last time I used it was on a Swift 5000 that would fail every 3 days consistently. This went on for a couple of weeks. Hooked up the analyzer and found a flaky Governor switch. No rhyme or reason for the 3 day failure interval. I guess it was just the elevator screwing with me.

The only thing that I don't like about the Wurtec S3 analyzer, is that if and when you are viewing an input voltage that is close to the lower end of it's detection threshold, it doesn't respond in "real time".

I had an intermittant fault with an escalator. If you lost the motor tach, it would shut down. And of course, if something in the safety circuit opened, it would shut down. Now if the saf circuit opens, you also lose tach, because it's stopped! So I wanted to know which came first, "the chicken or the egg"

So I set it up to observe the tach monitoring relay, and the tach at I think it was 12 vdc, (12 volts is the lowest end of it's detection range). When the unit would shut down, the S3 showed the tach relay dropping out first, and then the tach dropping off after the brake was set. Not a tiny bit, but by quite a bit. Nonsensical. The S3 did not record the chronological state of inputs accurately, if you were near the voltage detection threshold of the input.

Also, I found that since it is a high-impedance input, mere noise would fool it into thinking that it was observing a viable input state, when it wasn't. It needed adjustable drain resistance, to sink noise to ground, and quiet the input.

A few years ago, I called their engineering dept about these issues, and they said they were working on another version. I have no idea if these issues have been addressed or not.