Where are the guidelines for how to interface customized data acquisition equipment to LabVIEW?

[Jack1151]

I have a need to do some very specialized data acquisition that may require building special hardware. I would still like to use LabVIEW as the front end and perhaps even carry portions of the interface over into the final product. However, I cannot find the documentation. Where is that kept? I have seen references to a number of generic protocols, without any links back to the details, that may be suitable. The data is high bandwidth, but bursty with sampling rates up to 40 MHz and events that last about 100 milliseconds. Can anyone recommend which of the various methods would best suit this application?

[Dennis_Knutson]

What sort of physical connection are you going to use? USB, Ethernet, PCI Express, GPIB, serial, PXI? None of these (with the possible exception of PXI), are defined by NI. Where have you been searching?

[Jack1151]

It is a blank slate at the moment. It depends on what is easiest. I have been searching the NI website for anything having to do with how to write a LabVIEW driver for an instrument and have found nothing other than that is should be possible. I cannot believe that I am the only one that has ever considered the idea of attaching specialized hardware to LabVIEW. All I am looking for is the start of the thread that describes how you go about doing that, what the issues are and whether there are any alternatives that are particularly easy. For example are there any standard protocols that already have open source implementations? Is there an easy path to pretending to be some other instrument that already has a driver? I do not need an NI definition down in the target instrument. I need a definition of the interface, whatever that is.

[JÞB]

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@Dennis_Knutson wrote:
What sort of physical connection are you going to use? USB, Ethernet, PCI Express, GPIB, serial, PXI? None of these (with the possible exception of PXI), are defined by NI. Where have you been searching?

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PXI is defined under the PXI Systems Alliance

NI is a sponsor member of that group.

Driver development guidlines and resources are found here  And it really is not all that hard to do......IF you read the documents and understand the basic concepts

[Dennis_Knutson]

Well, those guidelines are for higher level drivers such as with USBTMC, VXI11/LXI, and GPIB. You have quite a ways to go before writing a driver for those.

And your physical interface would not be determined by what is 'easiest'.

[Jack1151]

Perhaps I have asked the wrong question. If I have an instrument for which no LabVIEW driver exists and I want to consider creating one, is the documentation available to me to do that? If so, where can I find it?

[Albert.Geven · Accepted solution]

You can use the instrument driver template and guidelines.

http://www.ni.com/white-paper/3271/en/

use google to search not NI

i searched 

instrument driver guidelines national instruments

[Dennis_Knutson]

Please be specific as to the type of instrument you have. It's silly to talk about guidelines for instrument drivers unless we know the physical interface and the type of firmware you have. It's very different between a daq type where you would use a call library node or equivalent and and an instrument that you use with VISA. Are you at all familiar with the many types of interfaces and protocols available? You have to make some basic decisions and you have not provided many details.

[Jack1151]

I think you can presume total ignorance. A document that is an overview of the universe of interfaces and protocols would be a great starting point. I agree that there are some basic decisions that need to be made. In truth I have several potential instrument platforms that I am considering none of which have LabVIEW drivers. I need a survey of possibilities to even begin making the basic choices. It will do me no good to select a platform without regard to the driver and then discover that I have picked the very hardest one to implement when there were other choices equally applicable to my application that are better documented with sample code that is really similar to what I need to do.

[crossrulz]

Once you have figured out your communication bus, it is just a matter of how to format your commands and data.  You will need to do this regardless of programming language you choose.  Formating the data is quite simple in LabVIEW.  You just have to write the data to the right thing.

Quickly based on the limited parameters you have given us, I would go with an Ethernet connection.  I'm not completely sure if the Ethernet bus will be able to handle your bandwidth, though.  If not, then you will need to go to a PCIe or PXIe connection.