Laptop Performance

[Dan Bookwalter]

We are setting up a laptop to do DAQ and analysis at customer sites. it appears that we will be doing DAQ on a couple of channels at up to 50 Khz/Channel in conjunction with streaming images from a thermal imaging camera via firewire. Anyone have any experience with this sort of stuff on laptops ? I am looking at a couple of laptops one is a Panasonic Toughbook 30 1.6Ghz and the other is a Dell Latitude ATG D630 2 Ghz , both will be configured with at least 1Gb of RAM and ~100Gb HD's. Will these machines be powerful enough to handle the DAQ and Firewire streams ?

thanks

Dan

[Neville D]

I would go with more memory and the fastest machine you can buy.

Will you be processing the images as well or just acquiring? What frame rate?

Does the app need the portability of a laptop?

If not you could probably get a PXI chassis running LV-RT and a Core2 Duo processor, and put the DAQ and Image processing on different cores. The PXI's are very rugged, and we use them in sawmills all the time. Never had one fail yet. Obviously, this is the most expensive solution in the range of $8-10K, plus the need to get an enclosure and/or cooling for the PXI.

Note that the firewire port on a laptop is different.. If I remember correctly, its 4 pin and doesn't provide the power. You should check that your camera will work with the firewire port on the laptop.

Neville.

[Michael Aivaliotis]

I don't know those models but one suggestion I can make: Get dual core. makes a big difference in general.

[BobHamburger]

In my experience, the biggest limiting factor with laptops have been the HD controllers. Unless you specify a higher-performance unit, you'll be limited to a top data transfer rate of about 20 MB/sec. For a point of reference: full-frame uncompressed color VGA (640x480 pixels, 4 bytes/pixel) at 30 frames per second will give you 36.8 MB/sec.

[TobyD]

QUOTE(Dan Bookwalter @ Aug 28 2007, 08:27 AM)

We are setting up a laptop to do DAQ and analysis at customer sites. it appears that we will be doing DAQ on a couple of channels at up to 50 Khz/Channel in conjunction with streaming images from a thermal imaging camera via firewire.

Out of curiosity - What make/model of thermal imaging cameras will you be using?