By Andrew Liszewski
I come from a very industrial-like city and in high school I had to take a few courses that involved working with metal and using gages. While those weren’t exactly my favorite classes they did make me appreciate the usefulness of a USB-equipped gage.
If you spend all day doing measurements with a gage, manually transcribing the values into a computer can not only be a pain, but can also mean the occasional mistake. With a USB-equipped gage each measurement can automatically be recorded into an excel spreadsheet or text document removing any room for error. Now keep in mind that gages have been able to connect to computers for a long time now, but via an RS-232 connection which don’t exactly come standard on today’s PCs. A USB connection is of course far more universal these days and at the same time USB hubs are far cheaper and easier to use than RS-232 multiplexer boxes. With the MarConnect system up to 100 gages can be easily connected at one time with each gage being individually recognized and identified with unique icons.
