Re: NI DAQPad-6020E

On Mon, Mar 31, 2003 at 02:34:36PM +1000, Darren Freeman wrote:
> Dear List,
> 
> I just subscribed so don't be surprised if this is obvious ;)
> 
> We recently got our hands on a National Instruments DAQPad-6020E(BNC)
> data acquisition box, and I wanted to use it from GNU/Linux as I would
> rather drink acid than programme under Windows. As you can all
> appreciate I'm sure ;)
> 
> Unfortunately there are lots of very similar model numbers listed as
> supported hardware, but not this one. Possibly because this one is USB
> and the others aren't.
> 
> Are there any plans to support this? Does it differ significantly from
> the others? I've developed Linux device drivers before, so I'd be
> willing to pitch in at some point.

The basic problem is that communicating with a USB device is
significantly different than with an ISA or PCI device.  For
someone that understands communicating with a USB device from
inside the kernel, and some experimentation with an actual
device, it probably wouldn't be too hard.  All communication
in the NI driver code is behind an abstraction layer already,
since it handles both ISA and PCI devices.  The problem is
that it would be dirt slow, since it would take 1 USB
round-trip-time for every ni_read() or ni_write().  Any
attempt to make this significantly faster would require some
major driver rewriting.



dave...

Received on 2003-04-01Z01:17:26