SMU trigger delay

[stephencox]

I am generating voltage pulses with an SMU in a pxi chassis.  The unit is a PXIe-4137, the chassis is a PXIe-1078.  It seems like I cannot add a delay to a trigger for these pulses using DCPOWER itself.  Am I missing something?  I think I could kludge it by creating the delayed trigger with DAQmx and then exporting it back to DCPOWER, but that seems sloppy.  I need, for example, to have a pulse start a few ms after a ~10 Hz trigger that starts a bunch of other things as well.

I guess I could also make a sequence that includes a zero pulse before the pulse I actually want, but that seems sloppy as well.  It will also make it more difficult to change the delay, which is a tuning parameter.

[Captain_K · Accepted solution]

Hi Stephencox,

You aren’t missing anything, the DCPOWER driver doesn’t natively have a trigger delay like the one that’s built into the DAQmx driver. With that in mind, if you have a DAQ card in your chassis, you may be able to make use of a counter to send a delayed trigger to the PXIe-4137.

[stephencox]

Ok, thanks.  I have a DAQ card with four counters, but I am already using three of them and I am somewhat inclined to save the fourth.  I think I will try the sequence approach.