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Which card can I use to develop SPI communication with Labview?

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First of all, I'm an intern currently working on a project that involves communication with an SPI interface. I have absolutely no experience with SPI but I'm definitely decided to try. I have been working with labview for about 6 months and understand basic function of many of its ressources.

 

The problem:

We want to communicate Labview to an Evaluation Board that is connected to the PC via USB (but it can also be adapted to connect through SPI). The evaluation board mainly reads and writes register to transcievers that are connected to this by an Evaluation Module. The program that already does that is the SmartRF Studio (which works via USB), but as we want to link all the functions to Labview we need to redevelop a platform to do it. So shortly, we want to do a SmartRF Studio version in Labview. We want to be able to get all the information the program does and such... and all this is possible through SPI.

 

Here is a link in case you are interested in what SmartRF Studio is: SmartRF Studio Link


My question ist which card do you recommend for what we are trying to accomplish? We are looking for something not very expensive but that will function to fulfill our requirements.

 

I'm thinking about the NI USB 8451, but please offer suggestions.

 

Thank you so much in advance and please stay tunned for my lots of coming questions regarding how to accomplish this gigantic task with no prior knowledge whatsoever of SPI or how to mix it with Labview being only a student. I'm currently reading as much as I can find, so any useful links will also be very much appreciated. If someone has experience with NI USB 8451 with Labview please be so kind as to guide me 😞 

 

Sincerely,

Gisela
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Message 1 of 14
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There are also numerous third-party SPI devices:

 

Aardvark (got one of these)

Diolan (got four of these)

 

Please do a search and you'll come across these.

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Thanks for the information. I've googled the couple of devices and the first one Aardvark says it comes with a Labview driver and examples whichI find great! As I said I don't have any experience. So do you know if the driver is really useful for what I need?

 

For the second one I've found

USB-I2C/SPI/GPIO Adapter - U2C-12

But I couldn't find out if it has a Labview driver or not.

 

I'm not a programmer and my experience is more related to GPIB and VISA communication, so I would like the easiest option to communicate with the devices. I have the evaluation board and the evaluation module and those have the 4 wire SPI communication. I have just one month and ten days to develop this kind of project, which I consider pretty big for only *one* student. So the easiest solution is the way to go.

 

So could you please tell me if which of the 3 do you consider more fit to my application (Labview version of SmartRF Studio) so I can ask my superior to purchase it for me (I have to be very careful in what I ask because they don't know very much about the project and if I ask for something and can't really use it, I'm pretty much dead :S) ?

 

Thank you very very much as you've pointed me in the right direction. It's nice to hear that you have used SPI... at least I know that someone out there can guide me, if and when you have the time, of course... As for the shipping time, I'll be reading like a maniac to be prepared to begin. Promise!

 

Thanks again!

Have a nice day 🙂

 

Gisela

 

 

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Thank you very much for the links... I'm currently checking them out, but my shift is almost over 🙂

I'm in Germany so... it's time to go home here.

 

Have an excellent day! And once again thanks for the links, I'm sure they'll help me... Anything will help me out even a little bit.

 

Thanks for your troubles and time! 🙂

 

Gisela

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Solution
Accepted by topic author g.garzam

If you have very little experience with LabVIEW and SPI, the NI 8451 is a good choice. It's expensive, but it's really easy to use and configure.

 

The Aardvark is also a good choice. It has LabVIEW drivers so it's also easy to use in LabVIEW. The cons is that it doesn't have much besides just doing SPI or I2C - in other words, it doesn't have a lot of GPIO. This can be important when controlling multiple SPI devices, as this requires individual slave select lines.

 

The Diolan is really more of a lab product, or something that's intended to be placed inside a device. It's cheap, compared to the other two, but it does not have native LabVIEW drivers. Rather, it comes with a DLL that you can call from LabVIEW. I wrote a set of LabVIEW drivers for it, but I cannot distribute it.

 

There are other products on the market, some of which will look like a serial device to your computer. Thus, you'd use VISA to communicate with the SPI controller, and it would generate the appropriate SPI communication.

 

Of the three mentioned here, I'd suggest you go with either the NI one or the Aardvark one.

Message 6 of 14
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I've used the Aardvark for several years.  I haven't had any trouble with it, but it only has 1 Slave Select (SS) line.
Jason
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Message 7 of 14
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Thank you very much for your answer, and so fast!

 

I already talked to my supervisor and they opted for the NI USB 8451 because they think it will be more useful in the future with other projects (having more SS lines and they loved that it has I2C, but the other one has that also)... so they'd like to see it as a long term investment.

 

I will come back when it  finally arrives and I start messing with it a little, to ask more questions about how to create the program correctly.

 

Thanks very much once more! The response was the what I was looking for.

 

Have a nice weekend... 😉

 

Regards,

Gisela

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Thanks for your response. They went with the NI one anyway... because they want to use it in the future with more than one device.

 

I appreciate the input, though 🙂 And will come back to ask some more when it finally arrives.

 

Have a very nice weekend 😉

 

Regards,

Gisela

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Message 9 of 14
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NI Hardware often cost more money than similar non NI hardware. But at least it will work in your Labview application without much trouble. Having an engineer sitting on his/hers bottom and scratching  head for days. Will often cost much much more than the savings in using non NI hardware


Besides which, my opinion is that Express VIs Carthage must be destroyed deleted
(Sorry no Labview "brag list" so far)
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