A hardware/software co-designed data acquisition system for Chinese tea discrimination

In cases of measurement, like the beverage discrimination or waste water monitoring, since sensors with direct measuring for specific variables cannot be practically applied, the interest in soft sensor technology, which is based on the acquisition and analysis for a lot of information variables, has rapidly increased. A requirement of portable and low-cost data acquisition (DAQ) systems is caused. Based on Field Programmable Gate Arrays technology, a novel DAQ scheme has been implemented by hardware/software co-design. By transferring certain software functions into hardware, it not only simplifies the design of embedded software, but also avoids the data stream bottleneck at the interface between the embedded hardware and terminal processor An experimental rig is established for Chinese tea discrimination, and four kinds of them have been discriminated. The results indicate that the proposed approach can also be adapted in any application for DAQ with a real-time analysis.