Microprocessors Design Aspects for Coastal Oceanographic Instruments

Abstract

A large class of coastal oceanographic instruments involve the acquisition and storage of data in the field over varying periods of unattended operation, Considerable flexibility in the design of such instruments is obtained through the use of microprocessor techniques. A well designed general purpose microcomputer board serves as the common element in several special purpose instruments, each having its own software invoked features. The data from a number of instruments can be logged, controlled and processed by common microprocessor based control units thereby speeding up design and development work. Other advantages of microprocessor based systems for coastal oceanographic work are the ability to manually enter heading data with few circuit complications for each set of readings and also the ability to use common data display peripherals to service a large number of unattended field recording units. In this short paper some examples are used to illustrate these aspects