Data Acquisition Toolbox Release Notes

Vendors

National Instruments Hardware

• If you use the Data Acquisition Toolbox and National Instruments' Measurement and Automation (M&A) Explorer at the same time, a conflict will occur and you will not be able to access your board. To avoid a conflict, you should access your board using either the toolbox or the M&A Explorer, and close the other software application.
• If you install NI-DAQ on your computer, and then install LabVIEW 6i on the same computer, you will need to reinstall NI-DAQ.
• You must use the PFI7 pin to input an external STARTSCAN signal. You must use the PFI2 pin to input an external CONVERT* signal.
• When running at a sampling rate of 5000 Hz or higher and with a TransferMode property value of Interrupt, there may be a considerable decline in system performance.
• You should configure the SampleRate property with the setverify function just before starting the hardware. Note that the SampleRate value depends on the number of channels added to the device object, and the ChannelSkew property value depends on the SampleRate value.
• When using the 1200 series hardware, you must add channels in reverse order. If you specify invalid channels, the data acquisition engine will create the number of requested channels with valid hardware IDs. You can determine the hardware IDs with the object's display or with the HwChannel property.
• Only one digital I/O (DIO) object should be associated with a given DIO subsystem. To perform separate tasks with the hardware lines, you should add all the necessary lines to the DIO object, but partition them into separate line groups based on the task.
• All channels contained within an analog input object must have the same polarity. In other words, the InputRange property for these channels must have all unipolar values or all bipolar values.
• When using mux boards, you must add channels in a specific order using the addmuxchannel function.
• If you have trouble acquiring data with the DAQPad-MIO-16XE-50, you should increase the size of the engine buffer with the BufferingConfig property.

ComputerBoards Hardware

• For boards that do not have a channel gain list, an error occurs at startup if all the channel input ranges are not the same or the channel scan order is not contiguous. However, if ClockSource is software, this rule does not apply.
• You should configure the SampleRate property with the setverify function just before starting the hardware. Note that the SampleRate value is dependent upon the number of channels added to the device object.
• For boards that do not support continuous background transfer mode (i.e., the board does not have hardware clocking), the only available ClockSource property value is software.
• When running at a sampling rate of 5000 Hz or higher and with a TransferMode property value of InterruptPerPoint, there may be a considerable decline in system performance.
• Most boards do not support simultaneous input and output. However, if software clocking is used, then this limitation does not apply.
• To use hardware digital triggers with the PCI-DAS4020/12 board, you must first configure the appropriate trigger mode with InstaCal.
• Some boards may return erroneous digital I/O ports - usually with an ID of 0.
• Expansion boards are not supported. This includes the CIO-EXP family of products.
• MEGA-FIFO hardware is not supported.

Agilent Technologies Hardware

• When you start an analog input object associated with an E1432A or E1433A board that has the Arbitrary Source Output option, the source is automatically started. Therefore, you should not use a TriggerType property value of Manual with hardware having this option.
• For analog output objects, you should configure the SampleRate and Span properties with the setverify function just before starting the hardware, since these property values depend on the number of channels contained by the analog output object.
• The first time you connect a device object to an Agilent board, a list of available hardware is determined and all the hardware is initialized. However, this list is not updated during a MATLAB session. Therefore, if you install a new board or remove an existing board while MATLAB is running, you will not see the new configuration. To see the new configuration, you must restart MATLAB. When all device objects are deleted from the data acquisition engine, all the hardware is closed.
• For the E1433A, the minimum sampling rate is 20 Hz and the minimum span is 7.8125.
• The first channel in the TriggerChannel property list is used to trigger the object.
• For the E1434A, channels 1 and 2 and channels 3 and 4 share a 56000 DSP. Therefore, certain operational aspects are coupled between the channels in each pair. For example, both channels in each pair will have the same RampRate property value.
• You must add channels in increasing order and a channel array cannot contain repeated channels.
• If you create a device object that spans multiple boards, the device object should list the logical addresses using the same order as returned by the daqhwinfo function. To determine the logical address order, use the daqhwinfo function with no input arguments and examine the InstalledBoardIds field.

Windows Sound Cards

• The maximum sampling rate depends on the StandardSampleRates property value. If StandardSampleRates is On, the maximum SampleRate property value is 44100. If StandardSampleRates is Off, the maximum SampleRate property value is 96000 if supported by the sound card.

• For some sound cards that allow nonstandard sampling rates, certain value above 67,000 Hz will cause your computer to hang.

• If you are acquiring data when StandardSampleRates is Off, one of these messages may be returned to the command line depending on the specific sound card you are using:
• "Invalid format for device winsound" occurs when the sound card does not allow for any nonstandard value.
• "Device Winsound already in use" occurs when a nonstandard sampling rate is specified and the device takes longer than expected to acquire data.

Known Software Problems