- From: Steve Sharples <sds_at_eee.nottingham.ac.uk>
- Date: Thu, 18 Nov 2004 10:56:35 +0000 (GMT)
On Thu, 18 Nov 2004, Bryan Cole wrote: > Can anyone comment on whether National Instruments new M-Series > MultiFunc-IO cards will work with Comedi? (As far as I know) at the moment they won't. This appears to be because NI will not release the register-level information required to write drivers for the new boards. I wrote to NI a couple of weeks ago regarding this... their response, and my original questions, are shown below. It's quite frustrating. In the end we ended up buying a couple of cards from Amplicon (PCI230): http://www.amplicon.co.uk/dr-prod3.cfm/subsecid/10056/secid/1/groupId/59.htm Part of NI's response was a suggestion to buy their E-series cards instead. I'm personally not prepared to buy older, lower-spec'ed, more expensive products from the same company that won't release information to allow others to write drivers. Just my own personal opinion, mind. Hope that helps, Cheers, Steve. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Hello Steve. Thanks for contacting national instruments with regard to your query of purchasing DAQ cards for Linux. We currently have no driver that supports the new M-series cards under this operating system. Most of our drivers themselves are free of charge with the hardware that you purchase and are availible for download at www.ni.com, and goiing to, 'drivers and updates'. There is deffinitely a plan to write a driver for the new M-series cards, but we have no idea yet as to how long this will be. I suggest that if you choose to proceed with NI, then it would be better to purchase from the following list of cards. The free 'NI DAQmxbase' driver, gives support for the following cards in Linux: PCI/PXI E Series and Basic MIO PCI/PXI DIO-96 PCI/PXI AO Waveform USB-921x We provide the package, 'Driver Development Kit', for the manual writing of drivers, as it releases sensitive information in order to write the drivers, however, this is not yet availible for use with the M-series boards either. Regards, Ryan Wickens Applications Engineer National Instruments http://www.ni.com/support ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ http://daq.ni.com/ni-daq/MIG_and_MAG_Specifications/linux/linuxProposal.html Support Question: Hi there, We are considering moving to NI for our data acquisition requirements. Previously we have been using Amplicon PCI230 DAQ cards, and several old ISA cards, many of which need upgrading. We use linux exclusively. We are currently using comedi drivers (see www.comedi.org) to interface the hardware to our custom C/C++ acquisition/hardware control. We have experience of writing device drivers (comedi and custom) for DAQ and other hardware in Linux. There are comedi drivers for your E-series boards, but not yet for your M-series boards, which NI seems to be pushing at the moment (better specs, less money). I gather (from the comedi mailing list) that register-level information about the M-series boards - that would allow someone (perhaps us) to write a linux driver - is not yet available from NI. Will this information be available in the near future? If not, how do you propose we proceed? We would like to stick to one manufacturer of boards, and we already have a couple of Amplicon boards. We have fundamental ethical objections to paying large sums of money for drivers that should come free with the hardware, and that we could write ourselves given the appropriate information. If direct linux support is not available from NI in the form of free drivers that come with the hardware, and you do not give out the necessary information so that others can write drivers, then with the best will in the world we cannot use NI's products. Kind regards, Steve. This message has been scanned but we cannot guarantee that it and any attachments are free from viruses or other damaging content: you are advised to perform your own checks. Email communications with the University of Nottingham may be monitored as permitted by UK legislation.
Received on 2004-11-18Z10:56:35