METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR REDUCING MICROPROCESSOR SPEED REQUIREMENTS IN DATA ACQUISITION APPLICATIONS

摘要

A method and apparatus for improving microprocessor data acquisition. Noise in analog signals (500) is removed by a low pass filter (300) with a variable cutoff frequency controlled to cut off all frequencies above a frequency range of interest. The filtered signal (310) is sampled by an analog-to-digital converter (400) at a sampling rate which is variable and controlled to sample at a rate that is at least two times the low pass filter cutoff frequency thereby reducing the rate at which data is passed to a microprocessor (e.g., 200) and reducing the need for speed in the microprocessor's (e.g., 200) processing.