Data acquisition on a modern Mac without NI-DAQmx

[das998]

Okay, I guess I'm really missing something big here. I just want to know what Mac users use as a driver for DAQ devices these days.

I have a user who wants to do some very basic data acquisition ( a couple voltages) using a USB-6000 DAQ and LabVIEW. They have installed LabVIEW 2021, and I assume they are using a fairly recent version of MacOS (but I am asking for that information now).

I've only done data acquisition on Windows before, so I am baffled as to where to go next. It seems that the last DAQ driver that worked on MacOS was NI-DAQmx Base 2015, which I am sure will not work with the version of MacOS the user is using, and would require an install of an old version of LabVIEW (probably LabVIEW 2015?)

Anyone know what is the MacOS driver for the USB-6000?

[l.hovs]

Hello  das998,

I found an article that can answer your questions, there you can find about setting up communication with USB instrument on Mac OS X.

Here is the link Instrument Control on Mac OS X - NI

_____________________________________

Best regards Lyudvig Hovsepyan

[rolfk]

You can’t be serious! Are you proposing to program the NI USB DAQ boxes through NI-VISA USBRaw? Aside that that would require the low level USB protocol documentation for those boxes, which always was hard to get by as NI did not want to supply them for support and possibly secrecy reason, there are quite a few other problems with that approach, including that it is very tedious work to program on that level.

If you just wanted to make the point that on the Mac the only currently readily available solution is to use a (virtual) serial port device and address that with NI-VISA, then I would almost agree. There is one more option, to use a network instrument and address it through the native TCP/IP functions.

One could use an Arduino or Raspberry Pi as such a device to talk with a custom made program on it in whatever the preferred IDE for that device is (not LabVIEW).