kacq is a program to acquire analog signals on Gnu/Linux systems. It focuses on acquiring, recording and displaying the data. At the moment, not much signal processing is performed by kacq. Our aim is to develop an application that is as stable as possible.
kacq is written in C and depends on two main C libraries. The graphical user interface is built with the GTK+ library. This is the library maintained by the Gnome project. The other important library used by kacq is Comedilib. This library, togheter with the comedi drivers, are the interface between kacq and the analog-to-digital devices. GTK+ is under the GNU Lesser General Public Licence and Comedi under the General Public License. This guaranties that all the code of kacq is free and will always be.
kacq was written to perform acquisition of analog signals using NI boards. It was tested with computers equipped with two NI PCI-6259 (64 channels) or one NI PCI-6251 (16 channels). When two PCI-6259 devices are present on the computer, they will be used in a Server-Slave configuration to acquire more channels simultaneously. For example, on a computer with two NI PCI-6259 it is possible to record up to 64 channels at a sampling rate of 20kHz. In theory, kacq should work without major modifications with most of the AD cards that are supported by the comedi project. In practice, this has not been tested.
The data are saved in binary files containing only the data. Each data point has 16 bits. The samples are saved one after the other. Within a sample, the channels are stored one after the other.
kacq has a simple graphical user interfece to set your recording configuration and display the data. The main window shows an oscilloscope with the expected buttons (play, stop, etc) to control it. All the configuration is done via the Edit/Preferences dialog box. It is also possible to use kacq in command-line mode in order to run it from shell scripts.