Hawk GUI: Signal Conditioning Live Panel

The user can access and change the signal conditioning settings while configured, scanning, or writing. Any change to the settings will be saved to the configuration after the system has been released.

Change of gain while recording

Any gain change during writing will be logged as an event in the HGL raw file(s), if the channel is being recorded in HGL file format. The analysis software will take into account those gain change events, when calibrating the data.

When recording in DATX format, the current file will be closed, and a new one will be opened. In the new file, the calibration information will be updated to take into account the new gain.

There is a preference setting to prevent the user from changing the gain while in a manoeuvre. This is mainly used when recording in DATX file. HGL has developed an application that is capable of recombining the DATX files generated by the Hawk acquisition engine, so that we produce additionally a single DATX file for every manoeuvre taken. In this case, any gain change event during the manoeuvre would be an issue.

Live Signal Conditioning Controls

During acquisition of data, the signal conditioning control panel is available from the acquisition screen, via the left side panel. Click on it to expand it, and then click on the signal conditioning button.

The live signal conditioning shows, for each channel, the settings that were applied in the “sig cond” tab of the channel configuration screen. Internal and external signal conditioning settings are separated in 2 different tabs.

  1. Internal / External signal conditioning tabs
  2. One row per channel in the All channels tab
  3. To Scroll up and down through the channels
  4. Current gain setting (gain of 1) on channel 7; clicking on the button brings up the panel described in 5.
  5. Panel to change the setting value (in this example, the gain). All possible gains are displayed, the current gain is highlighted in light blue.
  6. Click on this icon to see more information about the channel.
  7. Click on this icon to add a channel to a group of channels.
  8. Channel groups area.
  9. Tab to see the settings of the channels in the group currently selected in the channel group area.

Controlling Multiple Channels

It is possible to group channels together, in order to change a setting on all the channels within the group in one single operation.

  1. On the desired channel, click on the + round button
  2. Dialog pops up, enter the group name
  3. Click on the + button to add the group
  4. The group has been created and appears in area 4
  5. Click OK to add the channel to the new group

Note that any group previously created will appear in area 4; to add a channel to an existing group, follow step 1, then select the existing group in area 4, and then click the Ok button (5) to add the channel to the group.

 In example above, we have:

  • A group called “VOLTAGE”, highlighted in green, containing “CHANNEL 2”, “CHANNEL 3” and “CHANNEL 4”.
  • A group called “STRAIN GAUGE”, highlighted in red, containing “CHANNEL 3”. Channel 3 is a channel of type “ACCEL”, with bridge gauge type, and therefore has more settings than the other channels. We find the same settings at group level.

  1. Click on a channel group, to view its composition. In the example above, the user has already clicked on the “STRAIN GAUGE” group.
  2. The selected channel group composition is displayed on the second tab; the first tab displays all the channels
  3. Channels within the groups are displayed there – in example above, CHANNEL 3 is the only channel in the group.

In the example below, we now see the composition of the “VOLTAGE” group, with its 3 channels.

Now that we have groups set up, we can apply a setting change to all channels in the group:

  1. In the group, click on the targeted setting (in example above, the gain)
  2. Select the new gain value; it will be applied to all the channels in the group.

We just saw that it is possible to change a setting for a single channel, or a group of channels. That could lead to a state where one group, for a given setting, a channel within that group has a different value from the others in the group:

  1. “CHANNEL 4” has a gain of 1; the other channels in the group have a gain of 2.
  2. In the group itself, the gain value displayed is one of the 2 values represented in the group (in this case, gain of 1), the yellow colour indicates that this gain is not shared by all the channels in the group. Clicking on the gain button in the group will bring up the gain panel settings in 3.
  3. All the gains that are currently in use are displayed in yellow. The user can pick up any gain, which will be applied to all channels, as normal.

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