UEI (United Electronic Industries) Hardware

[djolivet]

Hi All,

was wondering if anyone has used United Electronic Industries (www.ueidaq.com) hardware with LabVIEW. I'm primarily interested in their 'PowerDNA' product line, but any feedback (good and/or bad) would be appreciated.

Thanks

Denis

[Tim_S]

QUOTE (djolivet @ Jun 16 2008, 10:37 AM)

I was wondering if anyone has used United Electronic Industries (www.ueidaq.com) hardware with LabVIEW. I'm primarily interested in their 'PowerDNA' product line, but any feedback (good and/or bad) would be appreciated.

I have had some demo units of the PowerDNA cube some revisions back (about 2 years ago now). What I saw was a mixed bag. The PowerDNA appears to be a nice little rugged system, but it lacked the quantity of I/O points at the rates we needed and wasn't expandable (I understand they have been working on a synchronizing signal since). Data throughput was far better than what we have accomplished using TCP to a cRIO unit (some of that is our code, some of that is using standard TCP) and the people that visited us were very willing to work with us on getting what we needed. There were some software features we needed at the driver level which UEI added to a beta (most are now part of the standard distribution) driver; the driver was returning bogus A/D conversions along with the streaming data. Note that while the hardware/software/firmware didn't perform as we needed and had a blatent bug, UEI did get on a plane and visit us multiple times (manager and technical expert) while there was only a vague possibility of a sale (we've not paid them for any of this).

The PowerDNA cube is a nice little (size-wise) expandable package. The cables UEI sells are nice, heavy duty with large metal thumb screws (versus the small plastic onces I've stripped skin off with from NI). The terminal blocks were a let down; they look like the NI TBX-96, but do not have common wires next to each other. For example, on NI's terminal blocks the pins are numbered (and I'm making this up) 68, 34, 16... which will correspond to channel 0 +, channel 0 -, shield, etc. The UEI terminal block had signal + on one screw terminal, signal - on another screw terminal and shield somewhere far away from everything else.

The PowerDNA system does not appear to (moderately-)directly cable to any signal conditioning. This may not be an issue for you, but my customers expect 3B/5B modules. More discrete wiring is more chances for noise or much, much worse to get into the DAQ system (things don't work so well when you let the magic smoke out).

Hope that helps you out.

Tim

[djolivet]

Thanks Tim. Their people seem to be very responsive and their driver seems to be well integrated in LV. I agree that their terminal block setup could be better. I priced out a couple of future systems we want to do and found that on average the NI cDAQ solutions are a little less expensive.

Denis