Hi,
we are currently looking into replacing our current hardware (made in-house). In a few days we'll visit an NI Test&Measurement roadshow; I'm pretty sure the NI folks will all go like 'yeah PXI is ideal for your application' but I'd like to get some more objective information first.
These are the requirements for a basic system:
real-time. I'll try to explain: must be able to acquire 16channels of analog data at 20kHZ/16bit, together with (ie synchronized to the uSec) 32 digital TTL inputs sampled at the same rate, every 2mSec with a maximum jitter of a couple of uSec. In other words, all channels of the external analog/digital signal must make it into the software exactly 1mSec later, represented as arrays of 20 samples per channel.
a low-latency link to an external pc running windows/linux/mac os. Ideally if the external pc would be polling that link, it should be able to react to any data on it within a mSec. I'm not sure that is even possible on a non-realtime os, but right now we poll the parallel port on XP an it seems to be doing that fine without too much jitter (seems never higher than 5mSec or so)
we must be able to write at least the signal processing in C++, with a compiler providing support for at least TR1. Ideally the entire application would be written in Visual Studio.
line-by-line debugging of the code. Again, ideally, this would be debugging with Visual Studio
At a first glance much of this seems possible with PXI running NI's realtime os, and programmed using LabWindows. But the site is a bit vague about what can and what cannot be done using LabWindows, plus I'm not sure how the debugging works.
Please share your thoughts about this. Recommendations for other systems than PXI are also welcome..
Thanks!