Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

"David Dudley" <[email protected]> · Tue, 24 Jul 2007 09:58:32 -0500

Might also want to look at www.measurementcomputing.com which provides
alternatives to a lot of NI cards, and provides better support and
documentation (well,... in my opinion).

David

>>> "Pedersen, UK (Ulrik)" <[email protected]> 7/24/2007
8:34 AM >>>
Hi,

It is true that National Instruments provide a Linux driver for a
subset
of their product range. In case you are interested in going down that
route: the driver is called "NI-DAQmx Base" which is a subset of the
functionality in the "NI-DAQmx" driver which does not work on (all?)
Linux systems.

Here is a list of the supported hardware for the NI-DAQmx Base driver:
http://digital.ni.com/softlib.nsf/websearch/FA87D0FA8A3C2085862571E6006A

4D64?opendocument&node=132060_US

Here is a pointer on how to get started with NI-DAQmx Base on Linux:
http://zone.ni.com/devzone/cda/tut/p/id/3838 

Apart from the LabVIEW interface to this driver, it also comes with an
ANSI C API which I found surprisingly simple to use once I got the
driver running -you need to run a free (as in beer) LabVIEW runtime
engine and tweak various bits and pieces first...

I only have one piece of NI hardware - the NI-USB-6009 - but since the
C
API is (almost) the same for all their hardware I started to write an
ASYN based driver support for NI-DAQmx Base. Eventually it could be a
generic driver across multiple hardware boards... It is a "rainy day"
kind of a project as my boss calls it so it is far from complete any
time soon but if one day we will get enough rain...

Let me know if you are interested in more details or code.

Cheers,
Ulrik

-----Original Message-----
From: [email protected] 
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Heinrich du Toit
Sent: 24 July 2007 07:38
To: TechTalk EPICS
Subject: Alternative for National instruments card

Hello

We have a project were we want to monitor some values (some analog
some
digital)
This is mostly for archiving and then later reviewing to determine if
equipment is working as it should over longer periods of time.
Also to try and determine if some equipment would need to be replaced
ahead of the time when failure occurs.

So far we've considered the national instruments cards. As they can do
all the I/O we require. 
They are also fairly easy to interface using DotNet.
But there is already a channel archiver for EPICS which I think is
worth
using maybe?
I know there are some Linux drivers for NI cards. Haven't looked at
them
yet.

But maybe there is some other card or system I can consider for this
project?

Thanks for your time
-Heinrich

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Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System