Data Acquisition Toolbox

Software

Regardless of the hardware you are using, you must send information to the hardware and receive information from the hardware. You send configuration information to the hardware such as the sampling rate, and receive information from the hardware such as data, status messages, and error messages. You might also need to supply the hardware with information so that you can integrate it with other hardware and with computer resources. This information exchange is accomplished with software.

There are two kinds of software:

• Driver software
• Application software

For example, suppose you are using the Data Acquisition Toolbox with a National Instruments AT-MIO-16E-1 board and its associated NI-DAQ driver. The relationship between you, the driver software, the application software, and the hardware is shown below.

The diagram illustrates that you supply information to the hardware, and you receive information from the hardware.

Driver Software

For data acquisition device, there is associated driver software that you must use. Driver software allows you to access and control the capabilities of your hardware. Among other things, basic driver software allows you to

• Bring data on to and get data off of the board
• Control the rate at which data is acquired
• Integrate the data acquisition hardware with computer resources such as processor interrupts, DMA, and memory
• Integrate the data acquisition hardware with signal conditioning hardware
• Access multiple subsystems on a given data acquisition board
• Access multiple data acquisition boards

Application Software

Application software provides a convenient front end to the driver software. Basic application software allows you to

• Report relevant information such as the number of samples acquired
• Generate events
• Manage the data stored in computer memory
• Condition a signal
• Plot acquired data

With some application software, you can also perform analysis on the data. MATLAB and the Data Acquisition Toolbox provide you with these capabilities and more.

The Computer

The Analog Input Subsystem