Mr. Zeng from Xinjiang said: "The natural gas installed in my house uses Hanzhong smart meters. The meter must be purchased with a magnetic card and then input natural gas. In three years, my house uses 120 cubic meters of natural gas, which is more than 100 yuan of gas. But after the first purchase I entered 100 square gas and used it for more than a year. When I used a magnetic card to buy gas, it said that the magnetic card was demagnetized. It was really inexplicable. It cost 50 yuan to reissue a card and the charge was very unreasonable. One year after the gas, I used a magnetic card to input gas and prompted a card error. I went to the natural gas company 4 or 5 times. After investigation, they said that the supplemented magnetic card cannot be used and a new meter must be replaced. A new meter is 680 yuan. I can’t use that much gas in the next year. What I want to explain now is that the watch produced by the manufacturer definitely has a problem. If the natural gas card is demagnetized and lost, you have to replace it with a new one. Is this reasonable? Can such a watch work?"

As the saying goes, "There is an inevitable reason behind any accidental incident." The author believes that the problem that Mr. Zeng responded is worthy of the attention of our entire instrumentation industry. What kind of products are really suitable for the market? What kind of products will be favored by consumers? Let us take a look at the instrumentation industry.　　Instruments and meters are instruments or equipment used to detect, measure, observe, and calculate various physical quantities, material components, and physical parameters. Vacuum leak detectors, pressure gauges, length gauges, microscopes, multipliers, etc. are all instruments and meters. Broadly speaking, instruments and meters can also have functions such as automatic control, alarm, signal transmission, and data processing. For example, pneumatic adjustment instruments used in the automatic control of industrial production processes, electric adjustment instruments, and distributed instrument control systems also belong to Instrumentation.

The main technical indicators to measure the performance of instruments are accuracy, sensitivity, response time, etc. Accuracy indicates the degree of consistency between the measurement result of the instrument and the true value of the measured value. The accuracy of instrumentation is usually expressed in accuracy grades, such as 0.1, 0.2, 0.5, 1.0, 1.5, etc. The total error of the 0.1-level meter does not exceed ±1.0%. The accuracy level is small, indicating that the system error and random error of the instrument are small, that is, the instrument is precise. Sensitivity represents the ratio of the measured value when there is a small increment to the increment of the indicated value caused by the increment. It reflects the smallest measured value that the meter can measure. Response time refers to the time interval from the initial value to the final stable value when the meter inputs a step value. Generally, it is stipulated that the time when it reaches 95% of the stable value. In addition, there are performance technical indicators such as repeatability, linearity, hysteresis, dead zone, and drift.

The domestic market share of medium and low-end electrical instrumentation products has reached 95%. The domestic market share of high-end products and the foreign market share of mid- and low-end products have been greatly increased on the existing basis. The market development of my country's instrument industry in 2010 is expected to improve. Product structure adjustment target. Among them, industrial automation instruments focus on the development of master control system devices based on fieldbus technology, intelligent instruments, and special and dedicated automation instruments. The technical level of the products has reached the advanced level of foreign countries in the late 1990s. In 2005, sales accounted for 30% of domestic instrument sales. Facing the market, comprehensively expand service areas, promote the digitalization, intelligence, and networking of instrument systems, and complete the transformation of automated instruments from analog technology to digital technology. At the end of the "10th Five-Year Plan", the number of digital instruments will reach more than 60%.

Key technologies for the development of modern instrumentation:

1. Sensing technology: Sensing technology is not only the basis for instrumentation to achieve detection, it is also the basis for instrumentation to achieve control.

2. System integration technology: System integration technology directly affects the application breadth and level of instrumentation and measurement and control science and technology, especially the automation degree and benefits of large projects, large systems, and large installations.

3. Intelligent control technology: Intelligent control technology is a technology that humans use to approach the best way through the measurement and control system to monitor intelligent tools, equipment, and systems to achieve the established goals. It is a technology that directly involves the benefits of the measurement and control system. It is the key to the development from information technology to knowledge economy technology. Intelligent control technology can be said to be the most important and critical software resource in the measurement and control system.

4. Man-machine interface technology: The man-machine interface technology is mainly for the convenience of instrumentation operators or main equipment equipped with instrumentation, the main system of the operator to operate the instrumentation or main equipment, the main system services.

5. Reliability technology: With the increasing expansion of the application fields of instrumentation and measurement and control systems, reliability technology is especially used in military, aerospace, electric power, nuclear industry facilities, large-scale engineering and industrial production to improve combat effectiveness and maintain normal The important role of work.