| Data Acquisition Toolbox | |
The hardware driver adaptor (or just adaptor) is the interface between the data acquisition engine and the hardware driver. The adaptor's main purpose is to pass information between MATLAB and your hardware device via its driver.
Hardware drivers are provided by your device vendor. For example, to acquire data using a National Instruments board, the appropriate version of the NI-DAQ driver must be installed on your platform. Hardware drivers are not installed as part of the Data Acquisition Toolbox with the exception of a special parallel port driver that allows access to the port's protected memory addresses. Additionally, a suitable driver is usually installed on PCs that are equipped with a sound card. For the remaining supported devices, the drivers must be installed.
The vendors/device types and the associated adaptor names used by the toolbox are listed below.
| Vendor/Device Type |
Adaptor Name |
| Agilent Technologies |
hpe1432 |
| Keithley |
keithley |
| Measurement Computing |
mcc |
| National Instruments |
nidaq |
| Parallel port |
parallel |
| Windows sound cards |
winsound |
| Note To interface unsupported hardware devices to the toolbox, use the Data Acquisition Toolbox Adaptor Kit, which is installed with the toolbox. To get started with the adaptor kit, read the Data Acquisition Toolbox Adaptor Kit User's Guide. |
As described in Examining Your Hardware Resources, you can list the supported adaptor names with the daqhwinfo function.
| | The Data Acquisition Engine | Accessing Your Hardware | |