Designing a Data Acquisition System

[orionteo]

Hi, i am currently designing a data acquisition system. Although i have used one before, i have never tried designing one and due to certain contraint, i will need to get my hand dirty this time by designing one. Hence i will need expert advise from this forum.

I understand that in a data acquisition system, there is the ADC card which convert the analogue data acquired by a sensor into digital format. I will need a ADC card to do this and a microcontroller to control this ADC chip. Then the microcontroller will repacket the digital data and transport it via RS485 to a host computer which will read the data and stored in harddisk.

I just want to check if my understanding is correct? Did i miss out anything? In the host computer, what do i need to do to get this computer (window based) to accept the digital data from the microcontroller?

Thanks!

Orion