Monitoring of a System through an Arduino?

Question

I am currently working on a project, where I will be doing the monitoring of a mechatronic system through the following measures :

• 6 x Motor temperature (Digital Signal)
• 6 x Motor Current (Analog Signal)
• 6 x Motor Vibration (Analog Signal)
• 6 x Spindel Vibration (Analog Signal)
• 1 x operating time

And I was wondering if using an Arduino as a parallel real time controller to process and monitor all these measure in real time was a good idea and if it's professional? By processing I meant detecting spikes within the measured data, saving data to an SD card(still didn't think of it properly), data exchange with another (company's) controller. The measuring frequency would be around 100 Hz.

And if not what would you suggest ?

Answer 1

You need to measure 18 analog signals, and even a Mega has only 16 analog inputs. If you settle for 16 channels, consider that arduinos have a single ADC, so your measurements will be taken sequentially and shifted in time by about 0.1 ms. This means a delay of 1.6 ms between the first and the last measurement in a sample.

If you're OK with the limitations mentioned above, you could use an arduino for this task. However, the professional thing would be to buy a data logger which has enough channels, much better precision, synchronous samples, and most importantly works out of the box. You will save a lot of time and money to the project by using a reliable equipment you don't have to debug and calibrate.