Continue to Site

Welcome to our site!

Electro Tech is an online community (with over 170,000 members) who enjoy talking about and building electronic circuits, projects and gadgets. To participate you need to register. Registration is free. Click here to register now.

  • Welcome to our site! Electro Tech is an online community (with over 170,000 members) who enjoy talking about and building electronic circuits, projects and gadgets. To participate you need to register. Registration is free. Click here to register now.

Homemade Labview DAQ

Status
Not open for further replies.

windozeuser

Member
Hello all,

I'm currently planning a project to make my own Data Acquisition system for Labview, it will be like the myDAQ or other NI Daq's, but will be cheaper for students to afford. The MyDAQ is already cheap for students but I wanted to make something that can be built for under $70

I plan on using the Arduino library for labview to interface to labview, but can you use any microcontroller with labview? I want to make a VI through USB using FTDI converter, but I want to see what the best microncontroller would be to be used for this application.

I want to have a 12bit ADC, GPIO, PWM, and the ability for labview to be used as a function generator GUI and oscilloscope GUI. This is so students will have almost an entire lab they can take home and try out projects with.

I'm just having a hard time seeing how labview would control through the microcontroller to turn things on and off, would it have to burn to the chip and be reprogrammed each time? o.o

I want students to be able to build circuits on a breadboard and hook it up to labview to display data and control the circuit.

Any books or recommendations would be greatly appreciated

Thank You
 
you would program microcontroller (arduino or whatever) once with code that would expose I/Os to external application (LabView or similar). no or very little processing would be done in the microcontroller. it would only act as gateway.
 
would it basically parse strings over USB? to control things? What type of protocol would be fastest or not too difficult to implement over USB/UART that some of the entry level professional DAQ's use. Sample rates and resolution dont have to be mind blowing though haha
 
arduino is nice but pricey, arduino uno is anywhere from $28-50 and only has handful of I/O.
if you are serious about this and really trying to make it low cost, try the ST32 Discovery boards.
with price of just $11-13, powerful cortex processor and ton of I/O they make excellent candidate for such product.
 
The ST32 discovery board looks sweet! I figured the Arduino would be easiest since labview already has a library to interface to it, but I see there are people that have done it with PIC's too.

Yeah I'm looking for any information on sampling time, and taking x readings y amount of time apart actually. This seems like the hardest part. For the basic design I want the 12 bit ADC, the I/O into labview and PWM outputs, the myDaQ has a lot of functionality on it, but if I can even get half of the functionality it would be cool. So Labview has an API or DLL that can communicate with USB using the SCPI and VISA protocols?

You keep saying the microntroller wouldn't do much, but I can't wrap my head around that statement, can you guys elaborate? I'm picturing the microntroller parsing and sending commands and constantly being taxed o_O Idk lol
 
No, YOU would implement the SCPI commands. Now, you COULD place them in a Windows DLL and call it from LabVIEW and then internally use something simpler.

The DLL method would likely be much harder.

See https://www.mathworks.com/products/instrument/supported/scpi.html?nocookie=true and the SCPI Consortium link on that page. That should get you an idea.

This https://www.diolan.com/products/dln2.html could work for you too. Take a look around especially at their API.

Once you can communicate to a COM port, it really doesn't matter if it's USB or whatever.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.

Latest threads

New Articles From Microcontroller Tips

Back
Top