What hardware do you regularly use with LV?

[thoult]

Just curious to find out what others tend to spend most of their time doing with LV, hardware-wise. I know plenty of people use LabVIEW purely for data analysis and the like, but there must be a healthy percentage of people doing weird and wonderful things (read: different to your own 9-5 8-5 8-6 working day!).

To start the ball rolling:

NI hardware - PCIe RIO cards (7842R), eventually porting to sbRIO 9636, USB-8476 LIN modules, USB-6225 M series DAQ, amongst others

Other hardware - Aerotech motion controllers and stages, IAI actuators, confocal distance sensors, colour detection systems, various vision systems, and encoders. Lots and lots and lots of encoders.

[jcarmody]

My stuff tends to have at least one Kvasser CAN device in it.

[crossrulz]

1553 communication, Agilent and/or TDK power supplies (I love the Agilent N6700 series module power supplies), Crosspoint Matricies of various kinds, Arbitrary Waveform Generator (PXI-5421), standard NI DAQ and DIO, PXI-4072 DMM (currently one of my favorite DMMs EVER), Tectronix scopes, Keithley DMM and Source Meter.  Yeah, a lot of standard ATE stuff.

But one of my absolute favorite devices is the PXI-7813R.  I have that card doing all kinds of stuff from simple DIO with pulses to sweeping square wave generation, to implementing a form of 1553 over a 422 hardware bus.  But one of the coolest things (at least I thought is was really cool) was using the PXI-7813R to generate a sample clock for the PXI-5421.  With that setup, I was able to take a customer supplied waveform and do a frequency sweep with it.

[EvenDeejay]

At our company we use:

DAQmx USB-6225

Arduino

HAMEG HMP2030 Power Supply

The 6225 devices are modified so that we can use D-SUB37 Connectors to easily connect different testsystems. Like so:

[pallen]

I’d say the most typical hardware for me to work with lately is a cDAQ.  Usually fitted with a combination of analog, digital and relay modules. 

Aside from the cDAQs, I’ve also been working with cRIOs and even some Fieldpoint devices lately. 

One of my ongoing projects uses DeviceNet and Modbus to talk a couple of different PAC devices at soy bean processing plant.  With half of the PACs on that network now obsolete and unsupported, it’s made for some interesting troubleshooting when things went wrong. 

[tst]

I have a locally manufactured bio-mechanical unit (a BKAC, sometime with a PE module attached at the front) which usually interacts with my LV code. It uses sophisticated image processing algorithms and actuators to do this interaction.

[PaulG.]

More recently I've been kickin' it old school with a box full of old "legacy" devices, mostly M and E series boards and SCB-68's most of it >5 years old. This stuff is still useful and solid for what I'm doing.  I build tests for robot components. The end product is a lot more interesting than how I get there. I'm even stuck at LV 8.5 at the moment. Almost makes me want to wear a mullet. 

[altenbach]

Well, one of my computers (120 MHz Pentium I, 64MB of RAM, 1GB HD) still uses an AT-MIO-16E-1. (ISA bus!!! for those who remember). Since a single device under Windows 95 only allowed a limited number of DMA channels (if I remember that right), it actually shows up as two devices in the device manager. 😉

[SnowMule]

6008's.  Hundreds of them.  I've got four on my desk right now.

Occasionally a 621x.  We have a 634x for some faster development stuff.

Lot of RF measurement applications... 5680's, some Agilent switches (controlled through a 6008 or 6501), freq counters. 

A lot of our data acquisition is driven by an electrochemical reaction, so 2 Hz sample rates are usually adequate.

6008 on a stack of battery charger/exerciser PCBs...

multiply that a few times... I like blinking lights.

[JÞB]

A Mouse and keyboard for some menu shortcuts  (Insert rim-shot here!)