Newark, Ca - 04/11/07 - Mosaic Industries has added signal conditioning to their 2 x2.5” Wildcard series, offering convenient interfaces to analog sensors and actuators. This tiny low-cost stackable solution enhances the capabilities of Mosaic's embedded controllers and is ideal for space-constrained embedded or portable applications.A stack of two mezzanine boards dubbed Mosaic Wildcards offers four channels of 4-20 mA inputs and four channels of 4-20 mA outputs with 16-bit resolution.
In addition, it provides four channels each of 0-10V inputs and outputs.One board, a general purpose Analog I/O Wildcard features eight channels unipolar, single-ended or four channels unipolar, differential 16-bit resolution voltage inputs and eight channels of 12-bit resolution voltage outputs. The inputs and outputs may use onboard or external references, and excitation voltages are provided for external sensors.The second board, a Signal Conditioning Wildcard extends the capabilities of the Analog I/O Wildcard by increasing its input and output voltage range and adding current inputs and outputs. It amplifies four DAC outputs on the Analog I/O Wildcard to provide 0 to 10V outputs and attenuates four A/D inputs to allow voltages up to 10 volts.
It also converts the other four DAC outputs on the Analog I/O Wildcard to 0 to 20 mA outputs and converts the other four A/D inputs to 0 to 20 mA inputs. The board is easily customized for other input/output voltage or current ranges.A package of pre-coded device driver functions makes it easy to use these Wildcards. High level functions initialize the A/D and DAC, acquire 16-bit samples from the A/D, and write 12-bit values to the DAC. This code is available as a pre-compiled “kernel extension” library to C and Forth programmers.
