Data Acquisition DAQ Hardware?

Question

I'm wondering what sort of DAQ hardware people are generally using? I have various AnalogIO and DigitalIO needs, and bought a National Instruments USB-6211 DAQ. It turns out that NI doesn't support their USB cards on Linux, nor support any cards on Ubuntu. (worst case I may be able to run a separate Windows machine with a ROS node to do the DAQ stuff).

Since analog and digital input/output are common among roboticists, is there a DAQ card that works well on ROS and Ubuntu? Thanks.

Steve.

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Originally posted by ssafarik on ROS Answers with karma: 306 on 2012-01-24

Post score: 3

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Original comments

Comment by ssafarik on 2012-01-27:
In particular, I need to do some fairly fast analog output, on the order of a couple hundred kS/sec, on two channels. None of the NCD devices seem to be very fast, and none of the Arduino solutions are very fast either. I could use an AVR with a DAC, but I'd like an off-the-shelf solution.

Answer 1

So far I've been able to get away with just using an arduino. The arduino has a 10 bit ADC, usually with a reference voltage of 5V--so you get a detectable voltage variation of 5/1023 or .0049 volts (4.9 mV), that coupled with a 16MHz process means you can get a respectable sampling rate (in kHz). It's cheap too (< $100)--that always helps.

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Originally posted by JeffRousseau with karma: 1607 on 2012-01-24

This answer was ACCEPTED on the original site

Post score: 4

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Original comments

Comment by soheilred on 2016-03-04:
In noisy environments, Arduinos don't work well. But these boards are more robust against noise. In addition, for many applications, such as controlling an industrial ac motor, we need to provide a voltage range in [-10,+10], which is impossible to generate with Arduino.

Comment by soheilred on 2016-03-04:
A solution for the problem that I have addressed is to design an op-amp circuit to.... But, that circuit will not work as good as a prepared package like NI Instruments DAQ cards.

Answer 2

Our vehicle has two National Control Devices IOADR8x hybrid relay and A/D controller boards. This device provides eight relays and five analog to digital converters. Each is controlled by a separate ROS driver node, which publishes current values and handles commands to set the relays.

We bought them back in 2005. I don't know if they are still available, but NCD makes lots of similar products.

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Originally posted by joq with karma: 25443 on 2012-01-24

This answer was NOT ACCEPTED on the original site

Post score: 2