PyLibNIDAQmx - a Python wrapper to libnidaqmx library

Authors:	Pearu Peterson <pearu.peterson AT gmail DOT com>
Website:	http://pylibnidaqmx.googlecode.com/
License:	New BSD License

History

• Project published on November 5, 2009.

Download

The latest release can be downloaded from pylibnidaqmx website.

The latest development code is available via SVN. To check it out, run:

svn checkout http://pylibnidaqmx.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ pylibnidaqmx-svn
cd pylibnidaqmx-svn

Installation

To use pylibnidaqmx, the following is required:

• Python 2.5 or newer
• numpy package
• libnidaqmx library

To install pylibnidaqmx, unpack the archive file, change to the pylibnidaqmx source directory PyLibNIDAQmx-?.?* (that contains setup.py file and nidaqmx package), and run:

python setup.py install

Basic usage

The nidaqmx Python package provides the following classes: AnalogInputTask, AnalogOutputTask, DigitalInputTask, DigitalOutputTask, CounterInputTask, CounterOutputTask that can be used to create NI-DAQ tasks and they have methods to create channels, setting timing and triggering properties and reading and writing data.

Here follows an example how to generate voltage:

>>> from nidaqmx import AnalogOutputTask
>>> import numpy as np
>>> data = 9.95*np.sin(np.arange(1000, dtype=np.float64)*2*np.pi/1000)
>>> task = AnalogOutputTask()
>>> task.create_voltage_channel('Dev1/ao2', min_val=-10.0, max_val=10.0)
>>> task.configure_timing_sample_clock(rate = 1000.0)
>>> task.write(data)
>>> task.start()
>>> raw_input('Generating voltage continuously. Press Enter to interrupt..')
>>> task.stop()
>>> del task

and example how to measure and plot the voltage:

>>> from nidaqmx import AnalogInputTask
>>> import numpy as np
>>> task = AnalogInputTask()
>>> task.create_voltage_channel('Dev1/ai16', terminal = 'rse', min_val=-10.0, max_val=10.0)
>>> task.configure_timing_sample_clock(rate = 1000.0)
>>> task.start()
>>> data = task.read(2000, fill_mode='group_by_channel')
>>> del task
>>> from pylab import plot, show
>>> plot (data)
>>> show ()

If Dev1/ao2 and Dev1/ai16 are directly connected then you should see two sine waves plotted to screen.

Additional documentation is available online in PyLibNIDAQmx website.

Help and bug reports

You can report bugs at the pylibnidaqmx issue tracker:

http://code.google.com/p/pylibnidaqmx/issues/list

Any comments and questions can be sent also to the authors.