Question: please may you tell me a bit more about what instrumentation means.

Simon Holyoake answered on 21 Jun 2013:

instruments are devices typically used to measure something, instrumentation is the broad description of collections of instruments, or adding instruments to something to measure it.

Instruments can measure voltages, pressures, currents, temperatures and many many other things, typically an instrument takes a physical property (such as pressure) and converts this into an electrical signal, which can then be read, stored and used to calculate a value

for example, if know a transducer measuring pressure gives out 1 volt at 1PSI and 10 volts at 10PSI, we can put these values into a spreadsheet and monitor how pressure changes over time