How can I contact NI-DAQ Development & Testing Teams?

[Dr_Flow]

How can I contact NI-DAQ Development & Testing Teams in USA? I have several suggestions but German support rejects to put me in contact with developers & testers in USA.

[duncan carter]

In my experience, mainly with a DAQmx problem in a dll called from a Delphi executable, such contact is screened through normal Support. In my case, I first gave support test executable and dll with source for the dll. Support verified the probllem and then forwarded these materials to Research and Development. R & D then asked, relayed through Support, for the project files for the executable which I forwarded to them. So far, after one week, I have not received a response. I have the impression that R & D does not communicate directly with end users including OEMs like me but that may be wrong. As you probably have noted, first you are recommended to find an answer in the forums or in past posts and then submit questions to Support.

[Dr_Flow]

I don't have a question. I have a suggestion. Or NI is not interested in opinion of those who work with NIDAQ?

[duncan carter]

You could try Contact NI | Product Feedback.

On the DSA topic that we discussed, I asked/complained about that almost two years ago without success; interestingly enough, this same problem has also affected open source driver development for Linux. On another subject, I have complained and pointed out a potential problem in MAX and have been told that it will be fixed in the next release; I first found a different version of this problem a year ago and reported it and MAX was changed but not properly so I'll need to wait and see how it is fixed as I have no feedback on this which is not a problem for me as it affects DAQmx and DAQmx seems to be broken as confirmed by support. Another method may be to discuss it with a marketing person
of influence; I've tried this recently on another issue but I don't have feedback yet. From what I can see, you mostly know about changes when they appear although, on at least one widely reported problem with support for Magma expansion chassis in 7.0 and 7.1, we were told about a month in advance that it would be fixed in 7.2; fortunately my hardware was supported in 6.93 which again was adequate bcause of the DAQmx problem which limited me to using traditional NIDAQ.

NI does very well on ordinary support questions but perhaps is less open to professional developer input and feedback. I know of other companies that are much worse.

[Stuart_G]

What are your suggestions?

Stuart G

[Dr_Flow]

1. To have a function which returns an error string by giving an error code. Similar to DAQmxGetErrorString() from NIDAQmx.

2. Add more functions to identify the possibilities of a card in slot n, such as:
GetNumberOfADC_Chans(slot)
GetListOfGains(slot, *gainArray, size_of_gain_array)
GetCardName(slot, *name, size_of_name)
IsLogGains(slot)
IsDSA_Card(slot)
GetADCResolution(slot,u16 *resolution)
..etc.. Many of these functions can be implemented via Get_DAQ_Device_Info() as well, if NI does not wish to create new functions.

3. I find it really bad that DAQ_Op() returns an array of i32 in the variable prototyped as *i16. Was it difficult to create another function DAQ_Op32()?

4. I find it bad that AI_VScale(), AI_Read(),
etc.. do not work for some cards (DSA). Was it so difficult to provide simple implementation via DAQ_VScale() or DAQ_Op. Now I did it myself:

//My AI_VScale()
const u32 count=4;
i16 binArray[2*count];//some DSA cards return array of i32
f64 voltArray[count];
uint i;
for(i=0;i status=DAQ_VScale(slot, chan, gain, gainAdjust, offset, count, binArray, voltArray);
*voltage = voltArray[1];//only for 16-bits DSA

[sicresearcher]

Well for the error portion. I found this troublesome to, so using the ErrConstant file they provided it was easy to copy/paste the codes and the comments to a function that returns a string. With the help of find/replace I converted the copied and paste code into a massive case select which returned the comment text as the error descriptor.

Hope this gives you an easy fix.

~Steve

[Dr_Flow]

Absolutely not. As soon as new NIDAQ version (with new error codes) comes, you should repeat your easy fix...
and do so permanently. You know, I have many interesting and creative things to do, other than monitoring new NIDAQ versions for the new error codes, card types, etc...

In summary, I am not fond of solutions which may break after the new version of the driver appears.