Can I just read encoder with motion control board?

[zener]

I need to read depth of pipe from and encoder. In the past I wrote 16 bit DLL to drive the Keithly Metrabyte M-5312 board. I am re-writing application in win2K and CVI 5.5. Can I use a NI motion control board to read encoder? I do not need motor control. I only need to read encoder. I have tried using the E series board and the LS7084 chip. The chip helps but is still not accurate and the conditions are quite harsh (vibration). Looses correct counts. I need to read from a count register simular to the metrabyte board. At depths of 15K feet and greater, a missing count or two can mean a huge error. Thanks in advance for any help.

[KenSun]

Hi Zener,

Yes, you can use the motion controller just to read quandranture encoders. You can also consider using the counter/timer boards like PCI-6602 to read encoders. It may be a better deal for you, if you are not going to use any motion control features.

Ken Sun
Applications Engineer
National Instruments

[zener]

Is the PCI-6602 board better at reading the signals than the AT-MIO-64E-3 board? What would I gain?

[KenSun]

I can think of 3 reasons why PCI-6602 is better. I haven't supported DAQ in a while, so for better explanation you may want to post the question to the DAQ group.

The counters on the MIO board does not support the Z or index phase of an encoder. PCI-6602 uses a 80 MHz timebase and MIO uses 20MHz. The resources on the MIO are shared, so the wiring is not as straight forward when you want to do encoder counting.

For more info, you can also check out
http://zone.ni.com/devzone/conceptd.nsf/2d17d611efb58b22862567a9006ffe76/6f25cba2cd73417786256869005e5fc3?OpenDocument

Hope this helps.
Ken