DAQ Specs

[navneet]

Hello forum.

My supervisor is planning on buying extra DAQ cards for our work, and I have to provide him specs of the best cards there are and which will be ideal for our work. Could you please advice me on 2 cards which can provide following specs:

Card 1: Multiple differential inputs (as much as possible), simultaneous sampling, ability to measure current also. has to be very robust card as it will be attached to a tablet PC and used in field.

Card 2: Able to provide -10 to 10 V ouput and perform high rate sampling (maybe  greater than 1 MHz) on a single channel. Multiple channels are not needed as it will be dedicated to a single instrument and measure a single voltage line. It should be able to provide 0 to 10 V square wave train, the frequency of which will be input by the user. The minimum ON/OFF time for the square pulse will be 2ms (ON) 2ms (OFF), thus the card has to have very good settling times.

Any advice will be greatly appreciated. 🙂

[NIthan]

Hello navneet,

You can visit this page on our website: https://www.ni.com/en-us/shop/category/multifunction-io.html which lets you pick various specs on the left side of the page and will show you cards that meet those specs. What form factor are you using? I will assume USB for the 1st card (since it will be hooked up to a tablet PC), and PCIe for the 2nd (since you want a fast sampling rate)

1st card recommendation: USB-6356 https://www.ni.com/en-us/shop/model/usb-6356.html This card is one of our few cards that offer simultaneous sampling; however, simultaneous sampling is going to make the card more expensive so you may want to consider if this feature is necessary. (To measure current, use a shunt resistor. We have cards that specifically measure current, but that's all they do and they don't have a lot of channels. Usually, customers just use a shunt resistor and a voltage input)

2nd card recommendation: PCIe-6353 https://www.ni.com/en-us/shop/model/pcie-6353.html This card has one of our fastest sampling rates for a PCIe card, and also has a -10 to 10 V output and input range. 

Feel free to browse our multifunction daq cards at the website I provided above if you want to look at different form factors or cards. I hope this helps!

-Nathan H

[navneet]

Thanks Nathan,

I am going through it now. You are right, no need to have that extra feature of emasuring current - can use a shunt resistor. One thing I have encountered with my current USB 6212 card is that in most cases it is not able to drive some units with analog output voltage and thus a buffer circuit is needed as an intermediate stage. This is an extra thing which we want to get rid off, i.e. the need for buffers at output end.