Driver Development Kit (DDK)

[Steve.S]

Hello,

Last November there was a post in this forum about future support for the X-Series boards in the DDK:

http://forums.ni.com/ni/board/message?board.id=90&thread.id=1590&page=1

About six months later, I am wondering if there is any projected timeline for this.

thanks very much, 

Steve

[Raj_V]

Hello Steve,

At this point in time, there is no definite timeline on the release of X-Series support in the DDK. It is currently still being worked on by our R&D team. I would keep an eye on the release notes of future releases of the DDK to verify the support. 

[Steve.S]

Okay, thanks for the info.  I'll keep watching for it.

[GordonWeast]

It's been nearly another year without the X series boards being supported in the DDK.  At least the description still doesn't include X series.  I didn't download it again to check in detail.

We have an M series driver, but not an X series driver in our product.  Lately our customers have been told by NI sales that they should start buying the X series boards instead of the M series boards.  That won't work until we can get the register programming information for the new boards.  Since our real-time kernel isn't Windows or Linux, we can't use any of your binary drivers.

When might we see some new information?

[JoeFriedchicken]

Hi Gordon,

I'm one of the engineers currently working on the X Series DDK project. The code is nearly feature-complete, and we're also polishing the documentation. The X Series DDK will be, what I hope you and others will find, a significant improvement over the M Series DDK. Concerted effort accross several groups is now becoming a very detail-rich code and documentation package.

Finally, the part you've been wanting me to say: we're anticipating a May release :-)

[GordonWeast]

Joe,

Thanks for the update.  I hope to see it in May and begin my work with it.

Gordon Weast

[thomassster]

Hi Joe,

As May is getting closer, I have been successful in using the M series package and creating a driver using Labview.  We have plans to use a Pcie-6323 on Linux.  Are we on pace for a release in May?  and also, how much different is this package in comparison to the M series package?

Another side question, are there version numbers to these packages?

[JoeFriedchicken]

Hi Thomas,

I'm glad to year you have LabVIEW RLP working for your M Series devices!

The X Series devices use different ASICs than the M Series devices, so the register interface will be different. The design of the chip objects is the same, however, and register classes still have get/set and read/write methods for their bitfields. The differences are in the silicon ;-) You'll see a new DMA controller and some renovated counter objects, but AI and AO will be largely unchanged. Finally, DIO now looks nearly identical to AI/AO. The good news is is that the register space is completely linear and available -- no more windowing around :-D

As far as the distribution goes, there will be examples and a plain-text register map. Also, there will be theory-of-operation documentation, a somewhat lacking piece for M Series (although the E Series RLP manual does cover 90% of M Series programming). I like the suggestion of versioning the releases, but the precedence so far has been a one time initial release online with subsequent clarifications/additions here in the forums. I'll see what I can do.

The examples are feature-complete and are undergoing testing now. I've found a few bugs to fix, and am still reviewing the documentation. I would say that we're still on pace for a May release :-)

[thomassster]

Hi Joe,

It is now May, and I'm hoping you might have an update for us anxious coders?

Thomas

[JoeFriedchicken]

Steve, Gordon, Thomas, et al: (I hope there's a larger audience than three ;-)

I do have an update! Example testing is complete. The DDK is still on pace to release this month. Here's what's remaining:

1. Final documentation review (there's a shiny new 300+ page manual!). I'm currenlty half-way through.
2. There are two outstanding bugs that need to be fixed.
3. There are several bug fixes to verify as fixed. In case you were wondering, I intend to validate these on 64-bit Linux ;-)

Once those are finished, the DDK is at the mercy of the web admins for posting for download. Still no word on versioning the components. I suspect that discussion will happen when we request the download page update.