Data Acquisition Toolbox Release Notes

Chapter 3
Data Acquisition Toolbox 2.0 Release Notes

New Features

This section introduces the new features and enhancements added in the Data Acquisition Toolbox 2.0 since the Data Acquisition Toolbox 1.0.1 (Release 11.1).

ComputerBoards Support

The Data Acquisition Toolbox 2.0 supports ComputerBoards hardware. You can create device objects associated with the analog input, analog output, and digital I/O subsystems for these boards.

You should use the Universal Library 5.1 drivers or the associated release of the InstaCal software with your ComputerBoards hardware (http://www.computerboards.com/).

Example: Creating a ComputerBoards Analog Input Object

To create the analog input object ai associated with your ComputerBoards hardware, you must supply the ComputerBoards adaptor name and the device ID to the analoginput creation function.

• ai = analoginput('cbi',1);
  

You can use the set function to display the properties associated with ai.

• set(ai)
  

Adaptor Kit

An adaptor kit for writing additional adaptors for the toolbox is included with this release. The kit includes source code for an example adaptor and documentation of the API. Additionally, the source code for the ComputerBoards, National Instruments, ComputerBoards, Agilent Technologies, and Windows sound card adaptors is included in the toolbox/daq/daq/src directory. You can find the adaptor kit software in the toolbox/daq/daqadaptor directory. You can download the adaptor kit documentation via the MathWorks Web page at http://www.mathworks.com/pub/mathworks/toolbox/daq/adaptor_kit/AdaptorKit.pdf.

New Functions and Properties

The new Data Acquisition Toolbox 2.0 functions are described below.

Function	Description
addmuxchannel	Add channels when using a National Instruments AMUX-64T multiplexer.
muxchanidx	Return multiplexed scanned channel index.
waittilstop	Wait for the device object to stop running

The new Data Acquisition Toolbox 2.0 properties are described below.

Property	Description
ManualTriggerHwOn	Control when the hardware starts. Valid values are Start and Trigger. A value of Start starts the hardware after the start function executes. A value of Trigger starts the hardware after the trigger function executes. Use the Trigger value to accurately start multiple hardware devices.
NativeOffset	Specify the offset to use when converting data from native format to doubles.
NativeScaling	Specify the scaling to use when converting data from native format to doubles.

Both NativeOffset and NativeScaling are channel properties for analog input and analog output objects. Therefore, you can configure these properties on a per-channel basis.

Modified Functions and Properties

The modified Data Acquisition Toolbox functions are described below.

Function	Description
daqhwinfo	The ConversionExtraScaling and ConversionOffset fields have been removed. You can use the NativeScaling and NativeOffset properties to convert native data to doubles.
flushdata	You can now specify that data corresponding to an integral number of triggers is flushed from the data acquisition engine.
getdata	The event data structure includes only the events associated with the data being retrieved. Previously, the entire event structure of the device object was returned.

The modified Data Acquisition Toolbox properties are described below.

Property	Description
TriggerChannel	When using National Instruments 611x series boards, you can now specify any channel in the channel list as the trigger source.
TriggerRepeat	You can now define trigger repeats for hardware trigger types.

Known Software and Documentation Problems

Major Bug Fixes