Onward...

Well.. After talking with NI tech support for a very LONG time about why I'm not getting any worthwhile data it was identified that I needed new drivers.. I was running RIO 3.0.1 or something, and I needed RIO 3.3.0 drivers..

So I download the drivers, 1.5GB last friday.. Get here today, install drivers.. Takes the computer about 1.5 hours to install them.. Reboot.. Check software on RIO target, it is still 3.0.1. Try to install 3.3.0 on device, but it always times out. So I try and remove the old drivers, and put on new. Times out again.. Try and format the RIO, but says I need to be in safe mode. Find safe mode dip switch, throw it, reboot, then format it... Reset IP information, put that back on. Reboot again. Take off safe mode dip switch, reboot. Still in safe mode cuz it does that automagically because no software on the RIO. Push software to is sucessfully! Reboot! Rejoice... 3.5 hours gone by, and barely anything to show for it.. bleg.

Let's go see what I can do with what I got...

-Kyle

I haven't updated in a while, but to my defense, I lost a big portion of one of my blog updates, and it makes me sad.

So... I've been working on buffered DMA transferred data, and I'm banging my head against the wall. For some reason, I am just not getting any data out of the DMA transfer. I went to a NI seminar up off of Cobb parkway a few weeks back, and the NI rep (Nick Rice) said to shoot him an email with questions, so I did today. Let's see what he has to say..

PICs for clicks!


-Kyle

Eureka!

Well.... I've finally managed to acquire a waveform... Granted, it is only the positive side of the waveform... I would need a splitter from the freq generator, and take the other lead and plug it into AI1 and then take the "lead ground" and put it to positive voltage source so the negative part of the waveform has a potential sink. Not really worth trying to figure that out currently, but it would be child's play if need be. As you can see, I'm losing precision in the sampling, but I ran out of time to figure out if it was from forcing the data to a lower precision, or I had max'd out the precision on the A/D.


Well.. Now I am off to the next part of this project, and that is quite exciting.


Coincidentally, I did goto NITS in huntsville, al this past tuesday. Stands for National Instruments Technical (or training?) Symposium. I learned a lot of very interesting things, but most of the juicy information wasn't "how do I do this" kind of scenario. It was picking up the little nuances of Labview that would trip the newbie up. For example, if you use a while loop in your FPGA code, it will throw your loop timing completely off, as the while loop takes quite a few clock cycles to actually work, where a special timed loop forces it to run on clock speed. The list goes on, but alas, my time has come to a close for today.

Au Revoir Mon/Ma Amie!

-Kyle

Real Time continued

Alright. I've been away for a bit. Was sick, and then had a car show... The break has given me some fresh air to hit it hard when I came back...


I've been working on the real time module to work at getting some samples from the frequency generator I have hooked up to the sbRIO board. It looks promising, but there are soo many layers with funky timing that it seems a little convoluted. Anyways... The real time wizard spits out a project explorer that I then went and dumped in an FPGA vi to acquire some data from the AIO port on the sbRIO board. Then the data input, I linked into the shared variable engine which let me tie that data up to a variable that can be accessed on a higher level VI, which can then be manipulated with the whole control palette instead of the limited FPGA stuff. I'm still a bit floundering in the dark, so I posted my progress on the ni forums to maybe get some insight about what I am doing right/wrong. I'll post my post recent project explorer so you can see kind of how the realtime project flows.

Real Time

I think I am kind of geared in the right direction by doing a real-time measurement. When I go into the real time wizard though, and it completes the wizard, it throws some error about missing some Variable timing engine. I looked it up online, and it says you need to install it through MAX. I went into MAX, and it is already installed. Not quite sure.. I love errors that compound my confusion.

Frustrating

I'm banging my head against the wall a bit, but that's nothing new... Trying to wrap my mind around the whole idea of getting some data up to the host vi, let alone putting it into a more useable format that just an indictaor... The getting started guide wasn't much help when it talks about waveforms, as it sees a continuous stream of data, where I will be waiting for the FIFO buffer to fill up, assert interrupt request, pass data up to host vi, then concatecate the data into an array, and then spit it into some useful waveform, or distribution, or plot, or some psuedo-oscilliscope.

Anyways, that's enough of my ranting.. Until next friday.

-Kyle

What's the frequency Kenneth?

So yeah, the subject is the name of a REM song. It was big when I was a teenager. Anyways..

Dr. He and I had a little chat today. Kinda got me going in a better direction. I broke out the signal generator, and hooked it up to one of the analog inputs. That wasn't the hard part.

I even got the FGPA VI done for it. Working on the Host VI side of it though. Getting the data seems to be pretty easy, but getting it into a workable form is another story. Since it is sampled data, it is a digital signal so to speak. Here is where I'm lacking a bit of knowledge.. Do I dump the digital signal into a 1D array, then generate a waveform? Or is there a way to take the digital data, and drop it straight out to a waveform that I can see? Still working on that.. Until next friday.

-Kyle