Monitoring and controlling systems are common in industry safety and security systems, measurements, data logging, etc. However, these systems are generally expensive. In addition, components and electronic design automation (EDA) tools needed for advanced controlling and monitoring are not widely available in some countries. This work focuses on designing a simple and low cost Data Acquisition (DAQ) system for the purpose of monitoring and controlling with low cost microcontrollers (MCU) and field programmable gate array (FPGA) utilizing two wire serial communication. Typically, DAQ systems perform signal conditioning, data conversion, processing, multiplexing along with associated transmission, storage and displaying data. A variety of design approaches were adopted to design this system from which the single master multi slave system device architecture was chosen. Two versions of the DAQ device were implemented; one with only MCU as both master and slave device and the other with FPGA as master device and MCU as slave device.Keywords: Data acquisition, two wire serial communication, field-programmable gate array
