Alicat devices are incredibly fast. Most devices take just 4 ms to register a change in process, and every device updates readings each ms. For applications where noise is present, it can be helpful to average out this noise on the front screen for ease-of-reading. This averaging will also affect serial and analog outputs.
See below for instructions on how to change flow and pressure averaging.
“Hello. My name is Michael Whiteside. I’m an Applications Engineer here at Alicat Scientific. In this video I’m going to be showing you how to use the averaging functionality on an Alicat device. Now let’s get started.”
In order to properly use the averaging functionality on an Alicat device, we will hit MENU (bottom right button), ADV SETUP (bottom middle button), SENSOR SETUP (top left button), and Averaging at the bottom here (bottom middle button).
What this averaging functionality does is it takes an average of all the instantaneous flow readings (or pressure readings) within a set period of time, and this period of time can be set between 1 and 255 ms.
We can change our pressure averaging (press top left PRESS AVG button) say to 100 (using UP, DOWN, and SELECT DIGIT buttons as needed). Press SET (bottom right button) to confirm this change. Flow averaging can be set to the maximum of 255. Just as an example, let’s set it to 256, and the device should come back with an error. And, yes, it does. “Value is out of range” is displayed on the screen. So, we will change that to 255.
And that is how you properly adjust averaging on your Alicat device.