Teacher needs help - VI acceleration & speed display from photoelectric sensors

[4theast]

I am an elementary school teacher with not much experience in electronics. I want my kids be able to measure the acceleration and speed of a baseball bat as it breaks the beams of 4 opposed mode optical sensors (this is a lot more fun than little cars.) NI engineers suggested I use the new USB-6008 to get the data from the sensors. Now what? I would appreciate any help out there with regard to using LabVIEW to display results.

[KileenC]

The USB-6008 uses the NI-DAQmx Base driver and there are several examples provided with that driver in the LabVIEW\examples\daqmxbase directory. You can start off looking at those examples in terms of how to acquire data using the DAQ device. As far as analyzing and displaying your data, are you looking to display the acceleration and velocity information via graphs? If so, I have attached a simple example program that computes velocity and displacements based on a given acceleration profile. Hopefully this will get you started quickly and easily.

Let me know if you have any further questions. Good luck!

Kileen

[4theast]

Thanks for your help. Was there supposed to be an attachment? Also I would like to be able to display the data via graph and as MPH. The conceptual problem I am having is how to start a sample aquisition. Will I need to send a signal the the logger so as to start the timing? Again, thanks a lot for you help!

[KileenC]

Oops, there is an attachment! I've attached it below. Sorry about that!

I would suggest starting off looking at the Acq&Graph Voltage – Int Clk.vi in C:\Program Files\National Instruments\LabVIEW 7.1\examples\daqmxbase\static\ai. Keep in mind that with NI-DAQmx Base you will want to use the NI-DAQmx Base Configuration Utility accessible through Start >> Programs >> National Instruments >> NI-DAQmx Base >> NI-DAQmx Base Configuration Utility. With the static NI-DAQmx Base examples, you’ll want to make sure that the task name you are specifying in your VI has been saved with the NI-DAQmx Base Configuration Utility. The actual DAQ measurement begins with the DAQmx Base Start Task.vi and you can open up that VI to look more closely regarding what that VI does.

In the future, since this is a more DAQ programming related question, you will have better luck posting to the Multifunction DAQ discussion forum.

Best of luck!

Kileen