Data Acquisition Idea Exchange

When a piece of hardware is simulated with MAX, I would like to be able to insert a transfer function or a signal simulating VI to allow me to get a more realistic test of a system. The current default of generating a sine wave for simulated acquisition only lets me test part of the code. If a transfer function, lookup table, or custom vi were able to be substituted for the sine wave generation, then I would be able to test many other facets of a system.

MAC OSX Lion (10.7) is just around the corner. NI-VISA 5.0 does not run or install on Lion. When will the new version be available for Lion?

Christophe

We need a way to query an output task to determine its most recently output value.  Or alternately, a general ability to read back data from an output task's buffer.

This one's been discussed lots of times over the years in the forums but I didn't see a related Idea Exchange entry.  Most of the discussion I've seen has related to AO but I see no reason not to support this feature for DO as well.

There are many apps where normal behavior is to generate an AO waveform for a long period of time.  Some apps can be interrupted unexpectedly by users or process limit monitoring or safety range checking, etc.  When this happens, the output task will be in a more-or-less random phase of its waveform.  The problem is: how do we *gently* guide that waveform back to a safe default value like 0.0 V?  A pure step function is often not desirable.  We'd like to know where the waveform left off so we can generate a rampdown to 0.  In some apps, the waveform shape isn't directly defined or known by the data acq code.  So how can we ramp down to 0 if we don't know where to start from?  This is just one example of the many cases where it'd be very valuable to be able to determine the most recently updated output value.

Approach 1:

  Create a DAQmx property that will report back the current output value(s).  I don't know if/how this fits the architecture of the driver and various hw boards.  If it can be done, I'd ideally want to take an instantaneous snapshot of whatever value(s) is currently held in the DAC.  It would be good to be able to polymorph this function to respond to either an active task or a channel list.

Approach 2 (active buffered tasks only):

   We can currently query the property TotalSampPerChanGenerated as long as the task is still active.  But we can't query the task to read back the values stored in the buffer in order to figure out where that last sample put us.  It could be handy to be able to query/read the *output* buffer in a way analogous to what we can specify for input buffers.  I could picture asking to DAQmx Read 1 sample from the output buffer after setting RelativeTo = MostRecentSample , Offset = 0 or -1 (haven't thought through which is the more appropriate choice).  In general, why *not* offer the ability to read back data from our task's output buffers?

-Kevin P