USB thing for test automation

You can write your own app or use the free version of DAQ Factory. The DAQ Factory documentation is abysmal though. We contracted with someone to write a custom app with a GUI using Python to drive stepper motors and read sensors and switches. Now that he's a Labjack U6 expert he might want to leverage his experience to other clients.

It's good that you don't need speed because the Labjack is pretty slow. We ran into some issues with stepper motor driving but there is a way to send pulses other than bit banging which worked to get the speed to an acceptable rate.

Well are you acquiring data at 10GSPS with RIS or 100KHz? Who would know anything from that insanely vague question?

DAQ Factory?

DAQtory?

Daiquiri?

You're making me thirsty ;-)

Tim

My mum would have just covered it in gold spray paint. ;)

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

But their forums are excellent. Within very few hours an Azeotech specialist will usually come online and explain things.

Oh yeah, harvest gold. That was the paint on our house with the first owners. And black railings ...

Fred,

You seem to be a miserable old grouch. What a way to live.

On Wed, 06 Nov 2013 16:54:47 -0800 in sci.electronics.design, John Larkin wrote,

Arduino

I'd have to program that, which would be another engineering project.

All USB interface devices have to be programmed. If you use a Labjack or something similar that has SCADA support this job becomes a whole lot easier. It's quick to learn or you could contract it out to a SCADA guy.

On Thu, 07 Nov 2013 16:59:54 -0800 in sci.electronics.design, John Larkin wrote,

You wrote "easy to program". Arduino is all about being easy to program.

You wrote "turn on/off various LEDs". Sounds like you have to program that part no matter what.

And hard to debug. You have to do everything in burn-and-crash mode, which is soooo 1975.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

The test program would run on a PC. Sure, we have to program that end. I'd rather not have to program the ADC end, too. If we program an Arduino, we'd have to document and formally release its code and all the build tools, so it's maintainable long-term.

Even more reason to go the SCADA route. For slower stuff it is, as Phil would say, the bee's knees.

One thing about the Labjack is that you need to watch the output current of the GPIOs since the F channel is only 6mA. I tried to drive a stepper motor with a built in encoder (you only need to supply two signals, step and direction), and the Labjack couldn't drive these from the F channel because the encoder has opto-isolators and you're essentially driving the LED of the opto-isolator which is 15mA max.

The Labjack documentation is abysmal, and there's definitely a learning curve.

On the U6 you have these funky D-Sub connectors for most of the I/O (there are some screw terminals for some of the I/O but not much).

Personally, I think that you'll find the Arduino to be much less work for what you're doing.

Our customer wants the source codes, gerber files and all build tools. It's a lot of trouble to install vendor tools. So, i would just ship them the hard drive with everything preloaded. Not too bad for laptop drive with Linux Mint pre-installed.

Not hardly. Took me about three hours from opening the box to having working code (not final code, obviously, but control and data acq happening). And I generally don't like A/D boxes, so I've rarely used them.

The screw terminals were all I needed, but a D-sub is a reasonable choice for a low-speed A/D and D/A box.

The other nice thing is that you can stack commands and have them done all at once, which reduces the dependence on the PC's timing.

Fanboy alert.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs