Sound card oscilloscope based on Elvis oscope source code

[Chipcommander]

Hi!

I am working on a sound card oscilloscope program.
The program should help secondary school students with electronic circuit (Chua's chaotic circuit) tutorials at home.
My sollution is to modify the NI Elvis' Oscilloscope program to interface with the PC's sound card.
The program is written in LabVIEW, and must be portable between Win32 and Linux platforms. I also have to implement the XY-Graph feature into the program.

I now succeded mounting off the code from the ELVIS hardware.
The main problem is with the DAQmx libraries.
Can I configure those libs in the program to get data from the sound card instead of the DAQ Card?
Or is there any DAQmx-compatible library that uses PC hardware?
Or what is the simplest sollution to modify that code to work on SoundCards?

This program should help a few hudred students to get familiar with science.
Please help!

THX
      Chipcommander

[PhK]

Hi Chipcommander,

why do you strip the NI ELVIS oscilloscope? Isn't it easier to build such applications from scratch?
NI ELVIS software is based on the driver for NI ELVIS, DAQmx is for NI data aquisition hardware.
There a special VIs inside LabVIEW to use the soundcard as input or output device. These VIs use the standard function calls from Windows. As hardware drivers are dependant from the OS you can't use the same VIs on other operating systems. On the other hand there is no protection on the soundcards to prevent damage of the computer if students bring +10 V to them....

Did you have a look at the USB-600x from National Instruments. This hardware has a very low prize (=affordable for students), you can buy it in a bundle with the student edition and it's supported under Windows, Linux and MacOS. You will find examples how to use it as basic instruments like DMM, oscilloscope, Function Generator, .... many schools use it successful this way.

Regards
Philipp K.
Academic Relations
National Instruments

[KostasB]

It sounds like that you do not actually have the ELVIS hardware.  Therefore, you should not use the ELVIS drivers at all.

You can create an oscilloscope for your sound card with the simple VI shown below. It will work for Windows and Linux.

Kostas

NI UK

Message Edited by KostasB on 02-28-2008 10:23 AM