Yes, the NI 7358 can control your motors. Additionally you will need an external power drive as the 7358 can't provide the current needed by the motors. There are a lot of drives for brushless motors available. Of course most other drives available on the market will work, too. In most cases you will need a UMI like the UMI-7774 to connect your motors to the drive but some drives also provide direct connectivity with NI motion controllers through a simple cable.
You should look for drives for brushless motors. The 7358 works with simpler drives, when you use the commutation feature of the board but in this case the number of axes that can be controlled is divided by 2 (4 instead of 😎 as each axis requires 2 analog outputs. As you need 5 motors you should go for the brushless drives, then. By the way: If you only need to control 5 motors you also could use the PCI-7356 (6 axes control) which is offered at a lower price than the 7358.
I'm a bit surprised that your motors come with encoders as typically brushless motors provide hall sensor signals that are used for the electronic commutation by the drive. Most brushless drives provide emulated encoder signals that are derived from the hall sensor signals so encoders shouldn't be necessary.
All NI motion controllers run the motion control loop on a DSP onboard in real-time. You can use any programming language that can call a DLL to program NI motion controllers. Easy to use libraries are available for LabVIEW, LabWindows/CVI and Measurement Studio. If you want to use it in a complete system with real-time requirements you can use the boards in a LabVIEW Real-Time environment.
I hope this helps,
Best regards,
Jochen Klier
National Instruments Germany
