Data Acquisition Idea Exchange

Absolute encoders have been around for some time, but NI's motion hardware still supports only incremental encoders.  I would like to see support for absolute encoders in NI Motion or NI Soft Motion.

NI supports almost any bus.  Why not SSI (synchronous serial interface) ?  

Of course, there is always the option to use an R series card and then build an interface.  Why not have a low-cost PCI or USB card? Also, perhaps a C-series module, so that we don't have to take up FPGA space?

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