02-28-2008 11:16 AM
02-29-2008 02:56 PM
03-03-2008 09:08 AM
Patrick, thanks for a timely response.
Our pulses are constant amplitude AND width. The width may vary some during duration of the count by +/- 2%. What I mean by "fraction" of a pulse can best be explained by the following example.
Let's say the pulses coming in at 100Hz and are slowly varying from 98 to 102 Hz. Then an external trigger (that is unrelated to the device producing the pulses) triggers your device to start counting. Counting whole pulses is easy by counting every up signal(or down). But our trigger may have occured when our pulse was 23% into a cycle before whole pulses start being counted. So our device counts whole pulses until the same trigger device triggers us to stop counting. That 2nd trigger may have occurred when the pulse was 82% into its last cycle. Suppose the time between the two triggers was measured with 7 decimal precision and was 165.773xxxx seconds and our device counted 166,685 whole pulses. But our device may have counted the 1st "up signal" as a whole pulse when in reality it was 67% of a pulse. And the last up "signal" that was counted as a whole pulse was fine, but 82% of that next pulse didnt get counted because the next "up signal" was at the end of its cycle. So if our device could do some kind of pulse interpolation and calculate 16685 pulses for 165.773xxx seconds is an average of 100.65 pulses/second and there was only 23.27% of a pulse for that 1st one (so 66.73% of a pulse needs to be subtracted) AND for the 2nd trigger there was 82.15 % of a pulse that didnt get counted(so 82.15% of a pulse needs to be added). This net is a +15.42%, so our final pulse count is 16685.1542 pulses.
Our pulse frequency for any given test may be as low as 6 Hz or as high as 100,000 Hz. The duraion of the test may be as short as 1 second or as long as 2000 seconds.
I hope this clarifies our needs and I hope you can help us do this.
Thanks ..Charley
03-04-2008 04:40 PM