MCC USB-200 Series: Single Gain Multifunction USB DAQ Devices

Simple, reliable, good fit for our application.

I have purchased at least 8-10 USB-201 and one TracerDaq Pro software items. I don't know what I would do without these tools. I am able to collect 8 channels of data rapidly or slowly with the ability to import all this data into Excel for further plotting and analysis. There is nothing on the market that can compare with it for price and performance.

Great DAQ for the price. Easy to program. Easy to use. Product improvement ideas: 1) extend the label on the top of the package down the sides to make it easier to match the screw terminals to their functions. Either that or add two more side labels or hot stamp the package with vertical lines. 2) add port read and write capability even when some pins are configured as in and others as out. As it is, you can configure all 8 as in or out and read or write all 8 OR you can define a mix of in and out but are then forced to read and write each pin individually.

Great DAQ for the price. Easy to program. Easy to use. Product improvement ideas: 1) extend the label on the top of the package down the sides to make it easier to match the screw terminals to their functions. Either that or add two more side labels or hot stamp the package with vertical lines. 2) add port read and write capability even when some pins are configured as in and others as out. As it is, you can configure all 8 as in or out and read or write all 8 OR you can define a mix of in and out but are then forced to read and write each pin individually.

The USB 201 has excellent "background" analog input. It requires minimal CPU; and will not interfere with other high speed timers as it uses a continuous input method. Aside from that, it has 8 DIO that, can all either do DI or DO. At this price range it competes with cheaper IO, but has all the features of a much more expensive unit. Great for beginners and professionals alike. Easy to use included source code made integration a breeze.

We were not able to use this product because of lack of information and working examples for accessing it from a common programming interface. The device appears to be very high quality and would be exactly what we need, if only we could access it from software. Its capabilities would have been excellent. The documentation is well structured and detailed about the physical capabilities, but lacking in how to interface to it. Our systems are C and Linux based, which are popular in many embedded systems. We sought ADC/DAC access through USB interface, which Linux PCs, Laptops, and popular modern embedded boards such as Raspberry Pi, BananaPi, Android, etc., all have. We did achieve an interface by installing Mono and using Visual Basic, but that is incompatible with our software and attempts to interface to it had insufficient performance. The documentation appeared to treat our preferred environment as foreign and was unnecessarily convoluted. Although it does not seem like much to expect, we were unable to locate reasonable methods to access the USB-201 from C under Linux within the time we had. We since found other solutions that were much better supported.

I used this along with the free DAQami software to create a quick validation test - I didn't need extremely accurate or fast data, just decent data that I could see and log to validate my setup. This and the software were perfect. I'm going to order several of these just to keep around the lab to be able to use any laptop (not just one with a Labview license) to hook up and do simple tests with. One update I'd like to see would be a 10VDC output to power a few sensors.

While we still haven't tried out the unit in every way that we plan (still in the early stages of the project) we are pretty happy with it. It is being used on an experimental test stand in an academic laboratory, where the money is somewhat limited, and much of it was spent on some essential, big ticket items, so getting this much "bang for the buck" helped sell them on performing these additional measurements. This allows them to gather a lot more information during the run of their experiment, making them very happy!

I was asked to help troubleshoot some shipboard generators and propulsion motors that were tripping off-line. I had purchased a USB-201 for student projects, but since it was on-hand tried it out monitoring signals to/from the generators, motors, and their controllers. It worked great - hooked up to a laptop and powered over its USB connection, data acquisition could keep going after the power failed. I added some photovoltaic optoisolators using International Rectifier PVI1050s so I could monitor high voltage signals without an isolated power supply.