Plug and play replacement for PCI-7350?

[Willy2a]

What current motion control card would be a plug and play replacement for the PCI-7350? We have a machine with a 7350 card that is acting funny. If we need to replace it, what can we use that would require the fewest other changes?

[Jochen]

Could you please specify a bit more in detail what "acting funny" means? Is the board defective or doesn't it work as expected? Do you get any error messages?

Thanks and kind regards,

Jochen Klier

National Instruments

[A_Person]

The PCI-7350 is still available for purchase from our website.  You can view the list of PCI motion controllers and look for the one with the appropriate number of axes.

However, I would recommend that before you purchase a new one you address any problem with the current controller.  As Jochen said, if you post more details here, we will try to help you.  Otherwise, please visit ni.com/support and look at speaking to an applications engineer about the board.

[Willy2a]

We are randomly seeing bad board ID errors. I have looked through the knowledge base. The two most likely issues that were posted are either Windows taking too long to initialize the board, or the type def of the board ID constant getting disconnected when the executable was built. Unfortunately the machine is not local so I am relying on second hand information. I just want to have my bases covered if we need to replace the board. I was not able to find the board with a product search of PCI-7350, so I assumed it was obsolete. I'll look again.

Are the PCI-735X boards the same as the PCI-7350, just with different numbers of axes?

Message Edited by Willy2a on 01-25-2010 09:52 AM

[Jochen]

To clarify the confusion about the naming of NI motion boards:

The term PCI-7350 describes the board family, while PCI-7352, PCI-7354, PCI-7356 and PCI-7358 are 2-, 4-, 6- or 8-axes versions of this board family. As Alex has stated correctly, these boards are still available for purchase.

The erratic behavior that you see sounds indeed strange to me. I think, the second explanation (disconnected type def) is not very likely, as I couldn't imagine why such a problem should occurr sporadically. If a communication timeout during initialization is causing the problem, there could be many reasons for that - a defective board is one option, but it could be also a problem with the PC's hard and software.

Which versions of NI-Motion and LabVIEW are you using? Maybe it would be a good idea to upgrade to a newer version of NI-Motion.

Kind regards,

Jochen Klier

National Instruments