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Has anyone here managed to interface a National Instruments DAQ card with Arch? (mander.xyz)

submitted 1 year ago by Sal@mander.xyz to c/archlinux@lemmy.ml

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I purchased a PCIe DAQ card from National Instruments (PCIe-6536B), and I have struggled trying to get their proprietary drivers installed so that I can interface with the card using the NI-DAQmx library in Python.

I am considering giving up on it. Has any of you worked (or tried to work) with these cards in Arch? If you can share how you managed I would appreciate it.

But, really, even knowing that someone has succeeded would be enough to motivate me to continue trying. And knowing that others have also struggled and failed would help me confirm that National Instruments is not the way to go.

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[–] nezbyte@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That card doesn’t appear to have Linux drivers in the standard DAQmx install. Disclaimer, I’ve never tried using NI cards on Linux.

https://www.ni.com/en/support/documentation/compatibility/21/ni-hardware-and-operating-system-compatibility.html

[–] Sal@mander.xyz 3 points 1 year ago

Oh, I had not noticed that page. I was hoping getting the NiDAQmx (https://www.ni.com/en/support/downloads/drivers/download.ni-daq-mx.html#494543) driver installed would be enough. So this means that even if I succeed it might still not support it 😅

I was quite naive when selecting this card. I knew nothing about PCIe and I figured it would be a very simple matter to read out the values...

I just found some videos about writing PCIe drivers from scratch, but since I know nothing about PCIe I have no idea about the level of complexity that it would take to reverse-engineer. I suspect that it might be a very difficult thing to do, maybe even practically impossible.