Multifunction DAQ
USB-6421, python + macOS
@labby-dab wrote:
why isn't anyone from NI here replying?
my request is relevant. thanks Santhosh for your insights but please no police work with no constructive replies
Several reason: These forums are not actively monitored by NI folks. Never have been, although in the past there used to be a policy that topics should not stay unanswered for forever, so technical support was encouraged to provide some answer if a topic stayed completely unanswered for more than a few days. However, the new NI has significantly moved away from the GPIB and DAQ board company it used to be. Also tech support people get not incentivized anymore to monitor these forums, if they do it it is mostly on their own and because they care about a topic personally, not as a company policy. For the flagship product LabVIEW, there are a few rebels who have constantly kept answering posts but for the rest, NI involvement on this forums is few and far in between.
Your specific request has additional problems:
1) Macintosh support has been a side note since over 15 years. Basically with the exception of a few countries worldwide where Macintosh is still a thing in technical academia, the Macintosh has a very minimal significance in engineering and there is almost nobody using it in industrial engineering.
2) Apples backwards compatibilities are almost non-existent. They change, depreciate and obsolete APIs on a continues scale, which makes it very hard to support a product on a long term base, especially when you have to interface to low level interfaces for hardware access. Their focus is not on supporting business in industrial applications at all, which need to operate for the by you mentioned 10 or more years, without having to be reengineered with almost every new MacOS version. As such your claim about having to support such timeframes and choosing a Mac to run your software on is definitely not a safe choice.
3) Most industrial hardware manufactures will rather give up their arm and leg than publicly documenting the low level protocols their products use and NI is not an exception. Partly it is about IP protection, but even more about support effort. Creating such documentation costs a lot of money, maintaining, updating and supporting it even more. NI did have in the past a MHDDK platform where they did publish register maps and low level protocols for select products. It was meant to allow businesses to use their products on specialized platforms such as various RTOS and special purpose Unix platforms. It assumed that the user knew EVERYTHING about how to create device drivers on that platform since NI engineers simply had no experience with these very special platforms. You could buy engineering support for it but very few did and the MHDDK was pretty much not used to create any significant deployments anywhere, which automatically calls the bean counters on the plan: x $ to create the DDK and according documentation with x/10 $ additional revenue? Are you crazy, we loose money on this and I don't care what great human purpose this could serve (anyhow a questionable argument).
4) Linux on the other hand has been rising and NI's choice to use Linux as basis for their real-time platform made support for Linux a lot more urgent. So they invested in there and while Linux support is also not easy, since the kernel folks are an even more anarchistic bunch than the Apple developers, but at least for the NI Linux real-time platform it is a mandatory requirement and that platform also brings in huge amounts of money. But reusing the Linux support on Mac is a wet dream, the two platforms are quite different on many levels, even though they are both a Unix descendent, and as far as device drivers go, they are just as different than any of them is to Windows.
Basically you could make a change if and only if you could convince someone at NI that you are going to buy 10000 pieces of hardware every year if such support is there. For 10 boards a year they will not even blink with their eye if you go to some other competitor, of which there are very few nowadays.
