Urgent problem! please help. high speed digitizer, channel switch time too long!

Question

Dear all NI high speed digitizer experts:
 I post a question concerning the two-channel configuration using NI5154 digitizer (see Need help to configure a two-channel acquisition using NI5154 ).
 As we need to do some measurement using NI5154 very soon so purchase a DAQ board as suggested by Efrain is not a option for our coming experiment. So I try to configure the NI5154 a two channel acquisition. I configure the NI5154 to count pulse in two channels. Our experimental setup will send pulse to channel 0 for 400 ms and then stop. 100 ms later pulses from other source will be send to channel 1 for 2 s.  I thought the 100ms dead time in our setup would be long enough for the digitizer to switch from channel 0 to channel 1. But after some test I found the digitizer takes more time to switch between channels. 
I made a test vi (NISCOPE-Timing.vi) just for count how many ms it takes for the digitizer to switch between channels. In the attached vi, if you run for only one channel one loop takes about 20 ms in my pc. If you run for two channels it takes about 130 ms for one loop. If you just run one channel twice the loop time is about 40 ms (I mean stop a channel and then restart the that channel).
I don't understand why it takes so long to switch from channel 0 to channel 1.  As I tested the niScope Commit.vi consumes a lot of time for the second channel. Is there any way to avoid this? We can not extend the 100ms long dead time of out set up so I must get rid of this problem. 
Solved!
Go to Solution.
Attachments:
NiSCOPE-Timing.vi ‏34 KB

Answer 1

Hi Lixin,
There are a couple of different options that you may try. The first, which it sounds like you may not prefer, is to use the TRIG line on the 5154 and somehow find a way to route both sets of pulses to that line. You can either somehow connect both lines to the one input or use some sort of external switch since the signals will not come in at the same time.
Unfortunately, what you re seeing in terms of the time it takes the board to reconfigure itself for a different trigger channel and re-inititiate is due to the settling time that is necessary for the board to be able to fully reach its specifications. The majority of settling usually occurs pretty quickly, but the board will wait for some time to get the best possible performance in terms of specs. If you are okay with reducing this settling time (and very slightly diminish the specified performance), then you can use an internal scope property to set the max settling time.
I have attached a .rc file which must be placed in the LabVIEW directory for niScope to enable use of this property node. Please place the file in your ...\Program Files\National Instruments\<LabVIEW 2009>\instr.lib\niScope directory. Once the file is in that directory, restart LabVIEW, and you should be able to see a new category in the niScope Property Node tree titled "Internal". Under that category, you will have the Max Settling Time property, which gives the driver a maximum amount of time (in seconds) to wait for settling before beginning a new acquisition. Add this new property to your first property node at the beginning of your program. I tested this out with a value of 50 ms and found that my initiate went from ~125 ms to ~53 ms or so after reconfiguring the trigger channel and re-initiating.
Hope this helps!
Daniel S.
National Instruments
Attachments:
niScopeMaxSettling.zip ‏1 KB