Re: Linux Support for NI PCI-6143 A/D card

Terry,

I have fairly strong views one this software - after being subject to it I 
sent the card I had back and got a refund and apology from NI and I suggest 
you do the same.  

My card (can't remember what it was) is not support under comedi - after long 
discussion with NI it appears that they will not release the documentation 
required to write a driver and the distinct impression I got from NI was that 
this was in order to try to protect them from having their cards copied.  

The softaware DAQ MX base is based on labview runtime libraries and uses an 
indirect abstraction of the PCI bus with a minimal kernel driver to 
communicate with the card.  A significant problem is that the library needs 
about 5 seconds of CPU to initialise - this occurs everytime you open the 
library and prevents you from doing all sorts of useful stuff.  I got the 
distinct impression that linux support (longer term) was an extremely iffy 
prospect and that relying on DA MX base was likely to lock me into old 
systems / kernels and old hardware.  As an example NI were unable to supply a 
64 bit version of the library making it impossible to use on athlon 64s 
(unless you run a retro kernel) because the 32 bit library is incompatible 
with the 64 bit kernel driver.

NI waffle on about making everything available in the future sometime - after 
long discussion I think this means in the long and distant future when people 
are no longer interested in the hardware.  It is a shame because one of the 
things that used to make NI cards worhwhile was the comprehensive 
documentation - we basically aren't using any new NI stuff in our labs now.

SA






On Friday 16 Sep 2005 11:10, Terry Barnaby wrote:
> Hi,
>
> We are working on a project that will probably use three NI PCI-6143 data
> acquisition cards under Linux Fedora Core 3. It looks like the NI PCI-6143
> A/D card is not supported by Comedi at the moment.
> Some questions:
>
> 1. Any ideas on how easy would it be to add a driver to Comedi to support
> 	this card (We have Linux driver development experience) ?
> 2. Has anyone any views on the NIDAQmx-base driver software that NI provide
> 	for this board ?
>
> Cheers
>
>
> Terry
>
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Received on 2005-09-26Z17:39:36