I'm looking for a vi to read an optical encoder.

[hic]

I have an absolute optical encoder - 11 bits and I'm looking for a vi or vis to read it, either on demand ot continuouly therough a 6259 card in a target PC running realtime ETS. The host is running Labview  7.1(RT) under WIN XP.

Any suggestions?????

Thanks, hic <hic@bu.edu> 

[Ryan_V[DE]]

hic,

Your DAQ card has the ability to do a continuous, timed digital acquisition of 32 lines. You need only provide a sample clock (this could be a counter output). I would recommend reading this data, masking it to 11 bits, and converting this digital value to a position. Attached is an example to perform continuous digital input.

Hope this helps,
Ryan V.
National Instruments

[JaredA]

You could go the route as suggested by Ryan which would work well, but it might prove to be more work than necessary to take your measurements. Your DAQ device has direct encoder support on each of the two counters. What this means is that the device can accept each of the signals from a single-ended encoder - A, B, Z (Index). If you are using an encoder with similar signals, then I'd recommend either opening up a position measurement example from the LabVIEW Example Finder, or configuring a DAQ Assistant according to the specifications of your encoder and then having the configured DAQ Assistant generate the code for you. The examples in the Example Finder can be found by browsing to Hardware Input & Output >> DAQmx >> Counter Measurments >> Position. If it's the raw 11-bit digital data that you'll need to transfer, then use the recommendation that Ryan suggested.