Monitoring human powered submarine performance using a data acquisition system with a custom display ASIC

This paper details the design of a data acquisition system for evaluating blade and shaft designs for a propulsion system of a human powered submarine. The objectives of the design were to sample and store data representing several analog signals and the times of measurement and display velocity and shaft rpm for the submarine operator in real-time. These sampled parameters were then used to calculate the submarine's performance in terms of velocity, thrust, shaft torque and rotations per minute. Several parameters were displayed in real-time to aid the submarine operator with training. To accomplish this, a custom ASIC was designed using VLSI and VHDL techniques to perform binary to decimal conversion. System design restrictions included size, power requirements, heat dissipation, and data integrity. Since the data acquisition system developed is a completely portable system, it will be possible to incorporate the system into other applications.