Upgrading very old traditional DAQ LabVIEW program

[altenbach]

I have a very old (LabVIEW 4.0) LabVIEW program that uses an AT-MIO-16-E1 ISA card on a windows 95 computer.

That computer needs to be replaced with newer hardware. We have a Windows XP computer containing a PCI-6221 card that seems to be sufficient for the job.

I upgraded the old code to LabVIEW 2010 and things seems to be OK except for the DAQ parts. Unfortunately, the traditional DAQ drivers don't support the PCI-6221. After some search, I run across the Traditional NI-DAQ Compatibility VIs Version 1.3 for Windows 2000/NT/XP and this seems to be a quick solution to run the traditional daq program on hardware that only supports daqmx.

Is this likely to work? The compatibility VIs are in LabVIEW 7.1. Would there be any issues recompiling them in LabVIEW 2010?

[HeatherBaker]

Hi Altenbach,

Keeping in mind the latest Traditional NI DAQ version (7.4.4) was released in 2007 and the Compatibility VIs were released in 2004, it may work as a temporary work around.  I would like to iterate the compatibility VIs are not a living piece of code maintained by R&D; however, I would anticipate most of the low level function calls to be the same.  Ultimately it is best to use the officially supported driver for the hardware to ensure full functionality and receive expected hardware/software behavior.  While migrating from TDAQ to DAQmx may seem daunting, the DAQmx API is more versatile.  My suggestion would be to find a DAQmx example that is of the same acquisition type, i.e. voltage, thermocouple, current, etc and replace the TDAQ portion of the code.  Output from the DAQmx Read is typically an array and should be similar to that of an AI Read.  This would allow the code to be modified more easily for the future and eliminate any unnecessary software troubleshooting that may be induced by untested software versions.  It is also worth nothing that Traditional NI DAQ is not supported on Windows Vista or 7.  Consequently another OS upgrade would necessitate the complete DAQmx migration. Hopefully this helps!