Configuring channel indices on multi-board PCI-4472 systems

[mdillon2218]

When using multiple PCI-4472, I've not been able to predict which card will index as ch.1-8, 9-16, etc. based on the PCI slot position. Is there a way to define the card position with a channel index programmatically?

[Marni]

Hello mdillon. Thank you for contacting National Instruments! To communicate with a channel using NI-DAQ you need to specify the device number set in the Measurement and Automation Explorer and then specify the channel number on that board. For example, in DAQmx you would set physical channel to Dev1/ai0 and in Traditional DAQ you would set device to 1 and channels to 0. Because of this, there aren't channels 9-16 for the PCI-4472, only channels 0-8 with different device numbers. If you are using DAQmx and aren't sure which device corresponds to which PCI slot, click on the device in the Measurement and Automation Explorer and look at the socket number (it start with 0x0). Please let me know if you have any questions. Hope this helps! Have a great day!

Marni S.
National Instruments

[mdmichael]

Marni,
It is of great interest to me to be able to correlate a PCI bus and PCI device number to the device numbers (Traditional NI-DAQ) that MAX assigns to the PCI NI-4472s. My goal is to be able to designate a particular slot in the PCI bus as the location of the PCI NI-4472 "master" in a multi PCI NI-4472 synchronous configuration, and do it programmatically. To accomplish this, I need to be able to determine the NI-DAQ device number for the PCI NI-4472 that is in the "master" PCI slot. Once I know the NI-DAQ device number of the card in the master slot, I can do the appropriate clock routing. One reason makes this correlation necessary is that the device numbers that MAX assigns do not necessarily remain the same. Do you know of a way that I can determine a card's device number if I know the PCI bus and PCI device number? I am really trying to make a specific physical PCI slot be analogous to a PXI Slot 2.

Thanks for your help,

Mark

[Shea C]

Mark,

A better approach now that we know you are using Traditional DAQ may be to call the "Get DAQ Device Information.vi" to poll the serial number of the device. In this respect if you knew the serial number of the board in the master slot you could compare by checking each device number until you found a match. At the point of a match you would know that that device number was the device number of the master. The serial number type is element of the information type input to the function. I hope this helps!

Regards,

Shea C
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