How do I synchronise my E series board with another computer?

[dnb78]

I have a 6024E PCMCIA Board on my laptop which I use for data acquisition. In the lab, I will also be collecting the same data onto another computer. How do I synchronise the two computers in order to ensure that at any given instant, both the computers have saved the same data? At least if I can send a time stamp from my laptop to the other computer every few minutes, that is fine. But I need to come up with a neat way of doing this. Any suggestions???

[Russell]

Hello,

Even better than a timestamp is a hardware synchronization signal. When you perform an internally clocked acquisition with a DAQ board, the scan clock used is actually available as an output as the STARTSCAN which I believe is available on PFI 7. Consult your E-Series User Manual for more information. You can run a wire with this signal over to your other computer and use it as an external clock for it's acquisition. Then you are assured that both acquistions are synchronized. (Both will sample the data simultaneously.) There is also plenty more information on synchronization here in the Knowledge Base and Developer Zone i
f you're curious.

Russell

Applications Engineer
National Instruments