Date: 09/01/2007

National Instruments add two more DAQs to it's family of USB DAQs

National Instrument has released two new high performance Data Acquisitions Devices (DAQ) with USB interface for PC based instrumentation. The USB-6221 and USB-6229 offers 32 analog input channels with a sampling rate of 250 kS/Second per input channel.

The complete range of USB DAQ devices from National Instruments work on signal streaming technology by effectively making use of bandwidth and performance of USB serial bus technology for seamless data transfer between DAQ and the Computer.

The technology used is message based rather than register based configuration, so most of the configuration happens in the devices itself making the USB bus less traffic crowded.

These devices are easy to use, small in size, portable and plug and play type.

The other key features are,
Four 16 bit, 833 kS/S analog output channels
48 digital I/O channels with up to 32 clocked at 1MHz.
Two 32 bit counter/timers
A low-noise NI-PGIA 2 amplifier and,
NI-MCal, a third-order calibration methodology correcting for gain, offset and non- linearity errors at all input ranges.


National Instrument's software support is very good. They have support for both programmers and non-programmers.

Each USB DAQ is accompanied with data-logging software. Programmers can use NI-DAQmx driver software and measurement services. The driver software provide multidevice synchronization, automatic code generation and open API.

The software driver works with National Instruments LabVIEW, LabWindows/CVI, Measurement Studio and SignalExpress, as well as C/C++/C# and Microsoft Visual Basic and Visual Studio .NET languages.

You can turn your PC into a powerful measuring instrument (Scope, multimeter, etc..) with a budget starting from Rupees 5000 onwards. The lowest priced DAQ from NI costs US$100.