Driver for pine bipotentiostat

[Lbaz]

Hello,

We have a pine bipotentiostat in our lab and up until now I have used a PCI-6221 card to control it only through its analog inputs and to get the data from the analog outputs of the machine. It is also possible to connect the NI card to the digital socket at the back of the machine and control more parameters on it. I didnt find a driver that will help me communicate with the machine and I asked pine if they could help me. They sent me the source code they wrote in C for an E series NI cards, I have no idea how can I use it in labview or even if I can use a code that was written for E series cards with M series cards. If you encountered this problem in the past or know someone who has a driver for this card family and bipotentiostat I would apperciate it if you direct me to the solution. At this point any comment might become helpful.

[Matt_A]

Hello Lbaz,

Do you know what National Instruments DAQ driver the pine driver uses? The newer, more popular driver is NI-DAQmx. The other alternative would be Traditional NI-DAQ (Legacy). In order for pine's software to run, you would need to have one or the other of these drivers installed. Does their software include a National Instruments DAQ driver? Have they included instructions on which driver to download?

If their C code uses Traditional NI-DAQ (Legacy) it would have function calls that looked like:
    AI_Configure();
    AI_Read();
    DIG_Out_Prt();
    etc.

If they use the NI-DAQmx driver the function calls would look like:
    DAQmxCreateAIVoltageChan();
    DAQmxCfgSampClkTiming();
    DAQmxWriteAnalogF64();
    etc.
Where all the NI-DAQmx functions begin with the term "DAQmx". The ability to use this code on an M Series device (like the PCI-6221) will depend on which driver it utilizes.

[Lbaz]

They use traditional NI-DAQ driver. Can I use it and integrate it in labview?

If so, how?

[Matt_A]

Hello Lbaz,

There is no support for the PCI-6221 in Traditional NI-DAQ (Legacy), as you can see here. Unfortunately, if you want to use the PCI-6221 to control your instrument you will need to rewrite the functionality in LabVIEW. I do not know of anyone else that has attempted this application, but if you provide a little more information we may be able to suggest somewhere to start. Could you provide some more specifics about the control mechanisms on this device? You mentioned that you can control it through either Analog Generation or Digital I/O. Do you know specifically how these two operations work? What signal levels is the device expecting? How does the control system work? The more details you can provide, the more complete an answer you are likely to get.