USB or Ethernet Data Acquisition for OSX not from N.I.?

By PeterG at Tue, Oct 17 2006 4:00pm |

  • General Discussion

Does anyone know of a *good* working USB or Ethernet based data acquisition device that works under OSX *AND* has driver level support for C++?.

We just had an absolutely terrible time with National Instruments. The drivers were useless and they REFUSED to release crucial register level documentation to us so we could write our own drivers. We just couldn’t make their products work. N.I. is obsessed with LabView, and any OEM applications that require an interface to C++ are not supported in a meaningful way. They used to do this, but things have changed.

This is an OEM app, about 50khz sampling rate needed and 14 or 16 bit quantization.

You kind advice may produce a witty email from me in return. 🙂

FIX:

I would second the recommendation for Instrutech. I’ve recently developed a data acquisition suite for a physiology lab and got truly excellent support from the engineers at Instrutech the entire way. Their OS X driver is quite solid and the C/C++ API is straight forward, though there are some issues with the USB interface if you need to get data to/from the ADC/DAQ every sample (instead of reading and writing data in blocks).

I’m planning to release the Objective-C data acquisition framework I wrote at some point. If you end up going this route, feel free to contact me and I will send you the code.