switch acquisition channels on the fly?

[HavingAnAliasIsStupid]

We're using E-series cards to do continuous acquisition at 100kHz per channel in 4 channels. This works great. Now we want to know if we can switch channels on our 16 or 64 input board "on the fly". We never want more than (say) 4 channels but we'd like to be able to select which 4 of the 16 available we are getting in real time.

Can we do this? Without losing data? If we have to lose data, how many samples are we likely to miss?

[Ben]

If you do not wnat to loose any, collect from all and only display the channels selected.

If sampling from to many channels will slow you down then you will have to stop, re-config and restart.

How much data lost? Depends on CPU hardware etc. Expect about a seconds worth of data lost, maybe more, maybe less.

Ben

[Filipe A.]

Hello;

You can do that, however, to change the group of analog input channels on the fly, you will need to stop and then restart the boad clock. That will cause you miss some data points.

In case you can't afford to loose data, you can set up an acquisition using all 16 channels, and then, only store the points from the channels of interest.

Hope this helps.
Filipe A.
Applications Engineer
National Instruments