Independent high-speed sampling for an oil drilling system

A method for acquiring a plurality of sensor data for an oil drilling system including a drill string at a wellsite, wherein the drill string has a data acquirer and a plurality of sampling collectors coupled to the data acquirer, wherein each of the plurality of sampling collectors has a sensor and a plurality of pages of random access memory (RAM) to store sensor data received from the sensor, wherein the data acquirer has a decoder and a memory, and, during operation, the data acquirer asynchronously acquires the plurality of sensor data individually from one of the plurality of sampling collectors, the method comprising:

• (a) acquiring a plurality of sensor data by of each of said sensors respectively contained in the plurality of sampling collectors independently, and storing the currently acquired sensor data in the plurality of pages of RAM in each of the plurality of sampling collectors;
• (b) transmitting a sampling collector identification signal from a controller to a decoder to the selected sampling collector;
• (c) selecting, by the decoder, a sampling collector from a plurality of sampling collectors based upon the sampling collector identification signal received from the controller;
• (d) transmitting an enable signal from the decoder to the selected sampling collector;
• (e) determining, among the plurality of pages of RAM in the selected sampling collector, a current page of RAM that is currently receiving the plurality of sensor data and an immediately preceding page of RAM that stores a last completed page of received plurality of sensor data from among the plurality of pages of RAM of the selected sampling collector;
• (f) allowing the last completed page of the plurality of sensor data from the selected sampling collector to be accessed by the data acquirer and disallowing the current page of RAM of the acquired plurality of sensor data from the selected sampling collector to be accessed by the data acquirer;
• (g) acquiring, by the data acquirer, the last completed page of the plurality of sensor data from the selected sampling collector without interrupting filling the current page of RAM with the plurality of sensor data, and without interrupting operation of a plurality of sampling collectors that are not selected;
• and
• (h) storing, by the controller, the plurality of sensor data in the last completed page of RAM in a memory of the data acquirer.