Re: Interfacing to I/O boards

[UK0392@AppleLink.Apple.COM (EHN & DIJ Oakley,BDV)]

John,
 
We work in MCL 2.0 and National Instruments' LabView (among other systems), and
would unhesitatingly recommend their products.  They can supply you with a
low-level programming suite called NI-DAQ, which includes good support for MPW
C.  You can thus build data acquisition and control software using the FF
interface (calling NI-DAQ material) or you can use the 'not in RAM' approach to
talk to the boards direct from MCL.  Although we have not yet brought the two
together in a project, I suspect that we will be doing so soon.
 
I would strongly discourage you from solutions based on serial port systems,
unless you require relatively infrequent samples and are happy to work
'remotely' with your data acquisition hardware.  Personally, I find systems
like that create more problems than they solve *unless* the remote device is
doing a lot more than just acquiring the data (e.g. we have one system for
laser Doppler blood flow measurement which has to work via the serial port
really, but the controller for that does all the frequency shift analysis etc.
and delivers processed data to the serial port).
 
Howard.