Patent ID: 8898216

Claim:
A data acquisition system comprising: a plurality of subnets comprising a plurality of data acquisition nodes; a plurality of data acquisition sensors forming each data acquisition node of said plurality of data acquisition nodes wherein said each data acquisition node further comprises: at least one primary board electronically coupled to the plurality of data acquisition sensors via a first bus to provide intra-node communication between said at least one primary board and said plurality of data acquisition sensors, wherein said at least one primary board further comprises a data conversion module to convert data associated with said plurality of data acquisition sensors; a dedicated mass memory board integrated with and coupled to the plurality of data acquisition sensors to accept and store streaming sensor data; an intra-node communications module configured to control intra-node bus communications between said plurality of data acquisition sensors and said dedicated mass memory board and to control storage of sensor data into the dedicated mass memory board; and, a gigabit Ethernet module coupled to the intra-node communications module and the dedicated mass memory board to facilitate inter-node high speed communications between the data acquisition node and a plurality of other data acquisition nodes; a subnet controller configured within each subnet of said plurality of subnets coupled to the gigabit Ethernet module of said each data acquisition node within a respective subnet of said plurality of subnets to control communications between the mass memory board, a graphical user interface and a remote database via the gigabit Ethernet module, the subnet controller module to communicate with said plurality of other data acquisition nodes and to accept and tag sensor data from the data acquisition node and from the other data acquisition nodes, the subnet controller configurable via the graphical user interface as a web server to serve the graphical user interface via a remote location and configurable to store data from the data acquisition node and from the other nodes in a remote database.