IOTech DaqScan

[Ben]

I am about to stat a new project to integrate a new IOTech DaqScan into an application.

Has anyone used the IOTech drivers yet and do you have any words of wisdom to offer?

I am moved to ask this question because drivers developed by people that do not know how to spell LabVIEW have bit me before.

BTW: Didn't NI buy IOTech?

Ben

Message Edited by Ben on 01-23-2007 01:02 PM

[Marc_A]

I've used them for a DAQbook. I've never had any problems, they're pretty straightforward. A little more confusing than anything from NI, but only because there are different VIs for every piece of hardware. For instance, in the DAQbook we use, there are 3 DBK13 cards. These cards have their own set of configuration VIs, I can't just run the DAQbook VIs. You'll see what I mean when you open up the palette for the first time.

You're a smart guy though, I'm sure you can figure it out.

[K. PH]

I have used the IOTECH Daqbooks, as well as the TempScan with thier software with pretty good results. 

As for using thier LabVIEW examples, the code is buggy and not easy to correct, the structure is pretty haphazard and needs more simplified examples.  Still is not worth it unless they can get regular instrument drivers into LabVIEW.  Not for the novice like myself.

As for NI buying IOTech, according to the support staff at IOTech, they are "one big happy family" but they are still on thier own.  I hope NI gets involved and puts together some real drivers out, so we can take advantage of the hardware.

If anyone has any example code they would like to share, it would be helpful.

[Ben · Accepted solution]

Although I did get that gizmo working (after re-writting most of the driver myself), the customer decided to toss that hardware due to the inefficient protocol for  doing high channel count apps. They wanted the upate rate at 1 second or smaller.

After talking with their support it turns out no ever attmpted (?) more than 96 channels.

Ben

[RavensFan]

---

Ben wrote:

BTW: Didn't NI buy IOTech?

---

Ben,

I think you are thinking of Measurement Computing which I heard NI bought a couple years ago.

One of my first data acquisition projects was about 10 years ago and we bought an IO Tech DAQbook and some analog input cards to acquire some vibration signatures from Bently Nevada probes.  Our company was cheap at that time and allowed me to buy that for about $1K.  I was pushing them to buy LabVIEW around that time, but they didn't want to allocate about $2K to get it.  It took about 8 more years before I could get LabVIEW and by then, I didn't have a reason to try to connect to that DAQbook anymore.  So I can't help there.

At that time, I used their data logging routines to log high sample rate data on about 4 channels of about 5 -10 minutes to a binary file.  I actually had to log about 8 channels because I needed to ground some in between channels to read to zero out the amplifier to eliminate cross talk between the channels of interest..  When complete, there program converted the .bin file to a .txt file automatically.    These files blew up to 100's of MB, which was really a lot back then  (about 1997).  Then I wrote some VB code in Excel to parst the text files, find sections of data of interest, and do some math that I had to develop and prove using calculus to determine amplitude and phase.  Then plot that vs. speed on an Excel chart.  It was a good project and I learned alot.  But with what I know now in Labview, that code could have been done in 5 minutes using only a handful of subVI's.

-Bill