TOTALLY lost - DAQPad-6016

[Steve_N]

New to LabVIEW, it is _very_ frustrating for a traditional programmer!

Have LabView FDS 6.1, DAQPad-6016 OEM.

The DAQPad came with no software.

Driver Reference CD of 11/2005 seemed to load fine.

Measurement & Automation Explorer works fine - can manually control the board via the Test Panel - control digital I/O bits, read analog voltages, all successfully.

But how do I get the dang thing into a VI???

I've got LabVIEW for Everyone, LabVIEW Graphical Programming, I've printed out the entire 198 page DAQ Getting Started Guide, when I do Find Examples from LabVIEW, I find no examples for this device.  I've gone thru the LabVIEW tutorial,  I'm finding no help that makes a connection between LabVIEW 6.1 and this USB DAQPad. 

What am I missing?

[GDE]

The DAQ-Pad 6016 requires the DAQmx drivers, but Labview 6.1 can only use Traditional Drivers, not the mx drivers. To use Labview with DAQmx you will need to upgrade your version of Labview to at least 7.0, but the latest version of Labview that is out is Labview 8.0 (likewise the newest version of the drivers is DAQmx 8.0). So I would recommend upgrading to that version of Labview and then you will be able to use the DAQmx examples that the drivers come with. You can download the evaluation version of of Labview 8.0 and try everything out, it pretty much has everything the full version has, just with a watermark.

Labview 8.0 (evaluation edition):
http://digital.ni.com/demo.nsf/websearch/14F9CE475127ADE786256AC60070926C?OpenDocument&node=157200_US

DAQmx 8.0 Drivers:
http://digital.ni.com/softlib.nsf/websearch/4C9E45F6EE5C29F98625708900712CBC?opendocument&node=132060_US

[Steve_N]

Aha!  That's why I couldn't ever get the DAQPad to appear anywhere.  A few minutes ago I talked to the programmer we're going to hire to do this job and he expressed doubts that 6.1 would do USB.  Another reason why I found no examples, or even an occurance of "USB" in the the Find Example Search.

The thing is, before we bought the four DAQPad-6016's for these test systems we had the area NI Field Rep come here to talk to us about the application and about using these DAQ's.  I asked him specifically if our copy of LabVIEW Full Development System version 6.1 was up to the task.  He said "Yes."

[GDE]

I apologize for the confusion, I'm sure it was an honest mistake, he probably heard "7.1" by accident, it is the most common version of Labview that people are using right now (though the transition now is to 8.0). I would highly recommend checking out Labview 8.0 since you can get a fully functional evaluation copy of it from the website and it has got some very nice features in it now (such as project management). Then if that's the route you would like to go with I would contact your Field Rep and discuss the options with him. Good luck with your application.