How does one query an e-series board to find its max sampling rate?

[Jolty]

I'd like to programmatically determine what the maximum sampling rate of an installed e-series DAQ board is. Is there a query or vi that returns this information?

[mhaag]

This question has a good answer already in our Knowledge Bases that discusses determining the maximum sampling rate in both DAQmx and Traditional DAQ. Follow the next few steps in order to access that article. In another browser go to ni.com/support, then at the very top of the page enter a search into the text box and search our technical resources. I used the keywords "maximum sampling rate" and the first link that came up is entitled: "Can I Programmatically Determine the Maximum Sampling Rate of My DAQ Card?"

Hopefully this will answer your question and provide you with some options on how to configure your program.

Regards,
Michael H
Applications Engineer
National Instruments

[Jolty]

Thanks for pointing me to the answer. I guess I was hoping for a more elegant way than hammering the board until it responds with an error to get this info, but that seems to be the only robust way. I've attached a vi that does this in hopes that it might help others with this need.

[mhaag]

The reason for this unelegant method is due to one main reason: there is no built in VI to read this information from the DAQ card because of the dependence of the DAQ performance on the system it is being tested on. This information cannot be hardcoded and read from the DAQ device by a VI since the maximum sampling rate will vary greatly from computer to computer. This variation will depend on the amount of traffic across the PCI bus by other devices, the processor speed, width of buses, type of memory access used, etc...

While we could create a VI that would spit out a maximum sampling rate based on the specifications in our catalog or from tests run on a specific system, this information would most likely be useless to 99% of the users and
create more problems then answers. Hopefully this will help you understand why the "maximum sampling rate" is not a set-in-stone value and cannot just be retrieved automatically based on the DAQ device being used.