Crystal Instruments High Channel Count Dynamic Measurement System

A high channel count dynamic measurement system is not a single instrument but a distributed acquisition architecture built around Crystal Instruments Spider front-ends. The building block is a Spider-80X or Spider-81 front-end, each carrying its own DSP, local storage and Ethernet interface. Clustering several front-ends through a Spider-HUB industrial Ethernet switch and connecting the cluster to a host PC creates one high channel count system. Expansion is straightforward: the Spider-HUB exposes ten Ethernet ports, one for the PC, the rest for Spider front-ends, with a spare port that can be wired to the next cluster so channel count grows cluster by cluster without replacing the host. Mixed module types can coexist in a single system; for example, a Spider-80Xi chassis holding Spider-80SGi strain cards and Spider-80Ti temperature cards can be combined with four Spider-80X front-ends to acquire vibration, strain and temperature simultaneously. Because every front-end stores data locally at full speed before transfer, recording is not limited by network throughput, and a Spider-NAS can serve as centralized high-speed storage that captures all dynamic channels at 256 kHz. Federated by Crystal Instruments EDM software and IEEE 1588 precision time protocol, front-ends across clusters stay phase-aligned to better than 1 degree, making the configuration well suited to modal surveys of large structures and multi-point vibration testing of complete vehicles and machines.