Stuart G,
thanks for your reply.
Unfortunately, our NI-PCI-5122 did not come with good documentation. There was a printed 'specification' booklet and a 'getting started' booklet. Both are also available as pdf from the NI web-support.
There came no manual with the card and no manual is available for download.
The 5122 will not show up in the support pages under "product manuals"
http://digital.ni.com/manuals.nsf/display?ReadForm&view=web_productcurrent&vid=niwc&node=132090_US.
At least the 5122 is not listed under DAQ devices and no high-speed digitizer entry is there.
If there is a link to the NI-5122 high-speed digitizer DAQ card, then this link is well hidden.
I can search for 5122 and find a download page for the 5122, called "User Manual"
http://digital.ni.com/manuals.nsf/websearch/998C51E969F4900486256D9F007103F2?OpenDocument&node=132090_US
(1) the site is telling me, that this maual is not the most recent one.
However the link to find the last version leads to just another search page.
(2) the link to the not so recent User Manual points to no pdf file.
I get a zip file containing *.chm files I don't know what to do with.
Only recently I found out, that these are Windows help files, not too much help on my Apple.
(3) When I moved to a Windows PC and opened the *.chm files I did not observe, what I was used to obtain as a NI User Manual.
In particular it is hard to find any docu about PFI.
When I search for PFI I find a lot of entries but none of them really explains in detail, what I can do with the PFI lines.
In summary, I did not find any description how to configure PFI lines.
Yes, I opened all 4 "User Manual" files and I have read all ~90 search reasults for PFI.
And I still don't what what I can use PFI lines for except that i can use them as trigger input.
I have a feeling that these PFI lines are just what I am looking for.
However, it is very frustrating for me that no real User Manual came with a $10'000 card.
It is possible that I am just too blockheaded to find the info about PFI.
However, I was doing fine the old days when NI products shipped with user manuals to read.
Not the topic of this thread, but without good user manuals it took me a while to realize that I have to install NI-scope after installing LabView and that I cannot use NI DAQ or NI-DAQmx to talk to my 5122 DAQ card.
I hope this all does not sound too desperate. I just wanted to comment on your post that the NI hardware comes with hardware manuals and that hardware manuals are available for download. This is simply not true for the $10'000 NI-PCI-5122.
Note, that we have another NI card in our Lab. Those days they wanted to use the PFI input for some kind of synchronization. As they also didn't find usefull PFI docu, they just trial-and-error-ed but failed. Mailed support from NI was of little help by that time. Only long after they had found other solutions, they found out that it was simply missconfiguration due to lacking documentation.
This is just to say, I am not the only one out there.
As there is no user manual and phone/e-mail support has to be paided for, the only help I can get is this NI-forum.
It is such a pitty that NI hardware is so great and works so fine with LabView, but I have to crawl the net for infos and will in the end not use the needed features that would be available.
--0--0--
So, if you can give me any link that explains the abilities of PFI, I would be very, very happy.
I am so desperately looking for help.
In particular, I was asking if I can connect a 10 Hz TTL signal to PFI 0, configure PFI 0 as counter, and read the frequency of this counter with a nice LabView VI.
Any good link is so welcomed.
Many thanks
Nepu.
