Compact hardware timed digital I/O

[gemuetlich]

Hello,

we are looking for a solution to do hardware timed digital I/O in a compact form that we would include as part of our embedded application. We need at least 6 digital inputs sampled at 10kHz. The largest dimension of the board should not exceed 120mm. Available interfaces are USB, Ethernet, Firewire, MiniPCI. However, it seems we can not find a suitable solution.

We have even been looking at the USB 6008, which is available in an OEM version, thinking we could fake the digital inputs with the analog inputs (i.e., binarizing the values in software). However, it seems that there is only one ADC and the 10kHz sampling rate is actually spread over the 8 inputs, resulting in only 1.25kHz sampling rate per channel.

Have we overlooked something?

Thanks in advance for any help!

Regards,

Marcus

[stilly32]

The closest i can think of would be the USB-621x OEM - http://www.ni.com/pdf/manuals/372083c.pdf but they are ~16cm long and don't support timed DIO so you'de have to make due with the AI. The wall powered M-series (USB 622x, 625x) would do the trick from the functional standpoint but they are even larger than the 621x boards.How many boards are you looking to deploy?

Hope this helps, 

Andrew S

[gemuetlich]

Thank you for your response. 160mm is a bit long. I have also been looking at the 94xx units (9421, 9411, 9426), but can't really make out if they support hardware timing.

What we really need to do is measure the times between pulses. In the prototype we used a PCI-DIO-32HS and sampled the lines at 10kHz. From the number of samples between pulses we got the time. Of course, there might be other ways to do this.

I am not quite sure what to tell you with regards to volumes. It may be in the low hundreds if things go well.

Marcus