Hello NI Forums,
Recently, a pin-on-disk tribometer (which appears to have originally been purchased new in 1997) was found where I work, and we would like to get it back in service. I reached out to the tribometer company’s manufacturer, and they provided some manuals for this machine. However, the machine is no longer supported by the company. Looking through the manual, these tribometers appear to have originally been shipped with a workstation which included a 37-pin DAQ PCI card. There is a 37-pin port on the rear of the tribometer itself which would connect to the PCI card. According to the manual, the complete setup also made use of specialized strip chart software (the last version listed on the manual as being from 1999: Version 3.3) and a software for wear track analysis (with the manual noting that the most recent version available at the time was from 2002).
It looks like the workstation used with this tribometer was removed several years ago, but a box for a Gigabyte Socket A Motherboard GA-7IXEH was found near the tribometer itself. This box contains some National Instruments literature from the late 90s up to July 2000 and an install CD for “National Instruments NI-DAQ Data Acquisition Driver Software” for Windows 2000/NT/Me/9x and Mac OS. The back of the CD case notes that it is Version 6.9.1., and because of where this box was found in relation to the tribometer, I am thinking that the original workstation that interfaced with this tribometer may have made use of a National Instruments 37-pin DAQ PCI card.
Ideally, it would be great to find what National Instruments 37-pin DAQ PCI cards were in use / available between 1997-2000 and see if it could be used with an older, standalone workstation (circa 1999, which incidentally has a different NI DAQ PCI card from 2000 currently installed in it) we have available.
Would anyone be able to advise on what offerings from NI matching these criteria would have been available from 1997 to 2000? Looking online I have seen some used NI PCI-6221 DAQ
cards come up, but I am not seeing anything earlier than 2004 silkscreened on them below the National Instruments logo.
Many thanks for any insight or suggestions, and I hope everyone’s 2025 is going well so far.
