SLU Nation Blog

Starman Electric recently announced the release of the wireless DataBridge, a wireless transceiver that provides wireless data solutions in a variety of situations. The DataBridge is capable of bridging analog, digital and UART data through the seamless connection of two modules. The two modules function as a wireless cable, and can be used in a variety of configurations including a wireless analog bridge, a wireless digital bridge, and wireless data acquisition to PC serial and USB ports.

The wireless DataBridge has numerous applications including wireless telemetry, remote data acquisition, remote control, industrial wire replacement, and serial cable replacement.  This module offers a variety of unique features including, point to point wireless transmission without complicated software programming. Each module offers six digital and two analog inputs and six digital and two analog outputs. The modules have a range of up to four kilometers, an internal or external antenna, and a power saving sleep mode.

The DataBridge wireless transceiver module can also be configured as a wireless analog bridge. In this scenario one module is setup as the master and the other as a slave. The master device samples the data and the slave regenerates the signal. The information is linked between the digital or analog input to the master device and the outputs generated by the slave device. In this scenario devices automatically connect when powered on. Starman Electric also provides extensive information, configurations, and schematics for additional configurations and applications via downloads on their website. With wireless becoming more popular, engineers will be happy to know that this product will make wireless development a breeze.

Crystal Reports is a third party program that is usually bundled with Microsoft Visual Studio and it allows you to turn different types of data into reports that you can use for your business. Manually putting together reports can be very time consuming which is why you may want to consider scheduling Crystal Reports to run on auto-pilot for you.

CRD is the actual tool that is used to schedule Crystal Reports and all you need to do is choose how often you want the reports to run and then what output you’d like them to be in. You can choose from MS Word or Excel, Adobe Acrobat, HTML, rich text format (rtf), RPT and more. Then you’ll need to choose who or where you want it sent to. After you define how you want Crystal Reports to run you can just forget about it and it’ll run your reports and send the generated reports to print, fax, e-mail, ftp and sts.

As far as frequency goes you can schedule Crystal Reports to run hourly, daily, weekly, monthly or you can choose to simply set a specific date and time for it to run. You can also set up a custom frequency such as every other Monday or even every third Thursday if you wish.

You can even add real-time monitoring to CRD in order to schedule Crystal Reports to run as soon as a certain event happens. Whether it be receiving an e-mail or a specific file is modified you can set it all up to run new reports any time a new event occurs.

The biggest advantage there is of setting up these schedules to run automatically is time. We can all use more time and this is especially true of businesses trying to make money. This will allow for more time you can have to concentrate on other aspects of the business such as gaining more customers or developing new products or services.

Whether you run a large business, a small business, are a large corporation or smaller mom and pop company you will easily benefit by saving time if you schedule Crystal Reports. It’s so simple to set up and execute and once it’s up and running you’ll never need to change the settings unless you want to.