NI PCI-6120 support

[Heinrich M]

Hello everybody

We recently acquired three new PC for using our old but gold NI PCI-6120 cards. Two of them will run on Windows with LabVIEW, so no problems there. However one was meant to work under Debian 11.2 with an in house comedi based feedback program. So far this program was used in a slightly older PC with a PCI-6031E and works just fine.

Now with the PCI-6120 i can not access the device. The error message "/dev/comedi0: No such file or directory" pops up. When looking for solutions it first seemed like the card just needs to be configured manually. I was in the middle of the process as explained at

relacs.sourceforge.net/doc/api/comedi/index.html

at step 11, however there is no file called /etc/init.d/boot.local which was referd to in the tutorial. I guess, that I could just create my own script, which is used during the system start up.

Now I didn't know, that comedi doesn't support all NI cards. The 6120 is unfortunately also not listed. So before I waste more of my work hours for this: Will the card be able to work at all with comedi? If so, what would be the steps I need to take? Does the support list only refer to autoconfigs? If not, is there an alternative?

Thanks in advance

Heinrich M

The system:
Debian 10 with the real time kernel 4.19.0-17-rt-amd64
i5-9600k (HTT disabled)
Some Asus Board with two PCI slots (lspci shows the pci-6120)

16 GB of RAM

[Ian Abbott]

Hello Heinrich,

Unfortunately, you are correct that comedi currently does not support
the 6120. I think the hardware is similar to 6115 (they share some NI
manuals), but 6115 is not supported either. There is a comment in
comedi's ni_pcimio driver code that reads "The 6115 boards probably need
their own driver" so I don't think ni_pcimio.c (and ni_mio_common.c)
could be easily modified to support these cards. It probably really
does need a new driver to support the 6115 and 6120 cards.

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[Heinrich M]

Thank you very much for your quick response.

It would probably be a miracle, if such a driver will be release soon/ever?

[Ian Abbott]

On 16/02/2022 14:08, Heinrich M wrote:
> Thank you very much for your quick response.
> It would probably be a miracle, if such a driver will be release soon/ever?

It would be a miracle. There hasn't been much support for additional NI
devices for about 15 years apart from simple changes to support PCIe,
PXI and PXIe variants of existing PCI cards.

Perhaps you could get the NI DAQmx drivers working, but Debian is not
officially supported, and the library API will be rather different to
comedi.

>
> Ian Abbott schrieb am Mittwoch, 16. Februar 2022 um 14:59:14 UTC+1:
>
> Hello Heinrich,
>
> On 16/02/2022 13:26, Heinrich M wrote:
> > Hello everybody
> >
> > We recently acquired three new PC for using our old but gold NI
> PCI-6120
> > cards. Two of them will run on Windows with LabVIEW, so no problems
> > there. However one was meant to work under Debian 11.2 with an in
> house
> > comedi based feedback program. So far this program was used in a
> > slightly older PC with a PCI-6031E and works just fine.
> >
> > Now with the PCI-6120 i can not access the device. The error message
> > "/dev/comedi0: No such file or directory" pops up. When looking for
> > solutions it first seemed like the card just needs to be configured
> > manually. I was in the middle of the process as explained at
> > relacs.sourceforge.net/doc/api/comedi/index.html

> <http://relacs.sourceforge.net/doc/api/comedi/index.html>

> <http://www.mev.co.uk> )=-
>
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[Heinrich M]

Very well.
Thank you very much :)