DAQ Serial Number Licencing

[benbrown]

I would like to licence an application based on licencing the software to work with specific pieces of NI hardware.  I.e. I want my customers to be able to install the software on as many PC's as the like, but it will only work with as many NI DAQ cards as they purchase licences for.  For each NI-DAQ card they purchase and licence with my software I will provide a licence file with the serial numbers embedded, so any copy of the software will work with any of the licenced hardware devices.

Is this a good idea or is there any easy way to change the serial numbers of DAQ hardware?  Target hardware are E and M series DAQ cards, both PCI and USB.

Thanks, Ben.

[PhillipBrooks]

I don't think you can change the serial numbers of NI hardware.

You could read the serial number of the hardware, concatenate it with a private string, then compute the MD5 hash using the function

C:\Program Files\National Instruments\LabVIEW 8.2\vi.lib\Utility\MD5Checksum.llb\MD5Checksum string.vi