New NI cards, line 78XX, and their interface with labscript.

[Tomáš Lamich]

Dear all,

Recently we've been running out of analogue outputs (AO) for controlling our experiment and I'm currently unsure how to expand on that front. As far as I know, the only natively supported device offering analogue outputs are NI DAQ cards.

Now the issue is that only cards that have more than 4 AO channels are cards like USB-7856 or PXIe-7891, which, if I understood correctly, are running new architecture compared to the 6XXX series (e.g.: USB-6363). 

Are the 78XX cards compatible with labscript, just like the 6XXX cards are? What about the low latency AOs on the PXIe-7891 card?

Is there another natively supported device, that would offer AOs in large number without the overhead of other connections that I missed?

Thanks a lot for any guidance.

Best,

Tomas Lamich

[dihm....@gmail.com]

I suspect the 78xx cards work fine since most of the details of working with the cards is handled by the NI-DAQmx library (which provides the common interface we use for interacting with all the NI DAQ cards). I would say you should try the directions for creating a device stub and see if the script has issues. If it doesn't the device likely works as is.

For getting lots of Analog outputs, most users tend to use the (now deprecated) 6733. I believe the replacement is the PCIe-6738. If I remember correctly, the new device uses a different breakout box than the older devices and it also doesn't have digital counters (which are used for wait timing while using a prawnblaster). Otherwise, it is excellent as it can provide up to 32 outputs. Note that it uses a sequential 1MS/s DAC so using all those channels will severely limit the per channel sample rates.

-David