Is a physical gate connection required to produce a gated pulse train?

[Peg]

I am trying to produce a gated pulse train with traditional Ni-DAQ. I am confused about whether the output of one counter needs to be physically connected to the gate of the second counter. If not, what directs the gating pulse train to the gate of the outputting counter? The NI-6036 is being used for this. E. Lee provided me with an example in DAQmx that seems to work without a physical connection, but I need to use traditional DAQ
Thanks,
Peg

PS - I also posted this under Multifunction DAQ

[Kevin_Price]

Peg,

No physical wire connection should need to be made at the terminal block. You should be able to do this in software alone. Here are 2 approaches:

1. Locate the shipped vi named 'Counter Gate (STC).vi'. This is found by navigating from the LabVIEW install directory and going to Examples-->DAQ-->Counter-->daq-stc.llb. Place this in your task config chain before starting the task. Set 'Gate Selection' as 'Misc' and the corresponding enum as 'other counter output'.

1b. You can look at the block diagram of this example to see how to do this in raw form using 'Counter Set Attribute.vi'.

1c. Dunno if this is still available, but there used to be a download here on ni.com for upgrading the counter pallette. When installed, several handy config vi's from the examples folder became available directly from the block diagram's DAQ-->Counter pallette. Probably some new things were added too.

2. What I myself typically did was to use 'Route Signal.vi' to send the counter output onto a RTSI line. Then I would configure the other counter to use the same RTSI line as its Gate. This can offer greater flexibility, but only when using a board with more than 2 counters (such as the 660x series that I was using). For you, using an E series, method #1 above should be sufficient.

-Kevin P.