Additional Pinout Charts Built Into Measurement & Automation Explorer

[NicholasAnd]

As a user of the SCXI 1000 with a 1302 board, I had a lot of difficulty finding information on the pinout of my board. The 1302 is a direct link to the 6220 DAQ card on my computer. When I first looked for the 1302, I could find very little information on it. By adding a few windows and commands to the M&AE, I probably would have been able to solve my problem in minutes instead of days.

Solution

A. Being able to add boards which link to pinouts of the computer's DAQ and treat them as a board.

B. Have a list of pinout boards which can link to the DAQ. Since I was dealing with a 1302 which has 34 pins instead of 64 (or something close to that) I had difficulty finding the information on the pinouts. It was far easier to find the pinout of the 6220.

It could be I was a little annoyed at the amount of time that I spent on finding information on the 1302, but it took me far longer to find the information than it should have. This data should be built in.

[Brad_K]

Hi NicholasAnd,

I have some questions about the process you used to search for help on this issue:

1. After you selected "Device Pinouts" from PCI-6220's context menu in MAX, it opened the NI-DAQmx Device Terminals Help. When you saw that this page didn't correspond to the SCXI-1302, did you scroll through the contents and check whether there was an entry for either the SCXI-1180 or SCXI-1302?

2. Did you search the "NI-DAQmx Device Terminals Help" for either the SCXI-1180 or SCXI-1302?

3. Did you search ni.com for help?

Could you clarify what you mean by "Being able to add boards which link to pinouts of the computer's DAQ and treat them as a board."? Are you talking about making terminal blocks or accessories like the SCB-68, SCXI-1302, etc. show up in MAX as separate items?

Would being able to configure "SCXI-1180" as an SCXI module and then select "Device Pinouts" from its context menu have solved your problem more quickly? (Assuming it returned a help page similar to What Are The Pinouts of the SCXI-1180?)

Brad

[NicholasAnd]

Brad,

The SCXI-1000 unit I was using was second hand, so I had to research on each of the parts

The story of how I found out how to use the 1302.

After finding that the SCXI-1302 did not correspond to any boards in the Measurement & Automation Explorer, I searched in teh Help menu. Finding that there was no information there, I searched on the National Instruments website for 1302. This proved to be a bit harder than I expected. I was regularly routed to a brochure about various types of SCXI boards. I read that the 1302 was a feedthrough panel. From that I searched specifically for pinout, 1302 and other data. I was a little annoyed when some of the tech articles had dead links on them as, I believe, there was an update in the server system in the last few years and some of the older articles were not linked properly. From there I looked through more articles, staying away from the discussion forum as there were dead links there and found two pages with the pinout for the 1302.  I did post one comment into the discussion forum, but I found the answer shortly after. I then worked off of that and learned, from when I was adding new signal inputs and outputs to the SCXI about where these 16 input and 2 output channels were located.

As for manuals of how to use or wire the SCXI-1302/1180, I could not find any other than the instructions of how to install the panel. 

Compared to using the SCXI-1520, which had a few manuals and pinout diagrams online and the SCXI-1124, which had a pinout diagram built in, the 1180/1302 was very difficult to find information on.

As for what I would like to see

In the M&AE, this is what I see

Devices + Interfaces

| NI PCI-6220 Dev1

| NI SCXI-1000

|  |  1.  NI SCXI-1520

|  |  3.  NI SCXI-1124

Could this be changed to include the 1180 so it would look like

Devices + Interfaces

| NI PCI-6220 Dev1

| NI SCXI-1000  SC1

|  |  1.  NI SCXI-1520

|  |  2.  NI SCXI-1180  (NI PCI-6220)

|  |  3.  NI SCXI-1124

Or could it have a right-click property on the  NI PCI-6220 Dev1 where one could specify the pinout attached to it. This would also update what the Connection Diagram would look like. Currently when I am making a new task for the 1180 board I see a connection diagram with all 64 pins instead of the number of pins that I have. This had confused me for a while when I started.

Nicholas