Data Acquisition Toolbox for Matlab?

Question

I've been spending a ton of time reading up on National Instruments products and their capabilities when used with LabVIEW. However, LabVIEW and National Instruments hardware is pretty much the only thing I've looked at, and I'm curious as to what is out there that competes with LabVIEW in an acquisition and control standpoint.

Hardware support is a big thing for me. National Instruments has a lot of different and high quality hardware. Plus there are some third-party manufacturers that write drivers for LabVIEW. MathWorks lists all the manufacturers who have written drivers to use this toolbox. But are manufactures still doing this or is or has the MATLAB toolbox lost popularity?

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Answer 1

MATLAB DAQ is very good (I wish the open source MATLAB clones like Octave and FreeMat would have something similar :) ). We were using it with several acquisition boards without problems. It is very configurable, so it's quite easy to enable data reading from completely new hardware.

If that DAQ toolbox still doesn't do the job for you then there are other toolboxes, like Instrument Control Toolbox that offer other type of communication protocols too.

But are manufactures still doing this or is or has the MATLAB toolbox lost popularity?

I don't think MATLAB (or any of it's toolboxes) lost any popularity :).

Farrier

Answer 2

Looking at the page from MATLAB, it looks like the Data Acquisition toolbox is a wrapper for NI-DAQmx driverset. If they have written it properly, you should be able to access a lot of the functions of the NI hardware. Isn't it possible to directly access the daqmx DLL files in MATLAB?

Quadrangle

Answer 3

There are not that many direct competitors to LabVIEW. What I see is that in the test/measurement/daq world the big competitor is C or C++. In the control world it is Ladder Logic.

Hardware is a different issue. NI owns about 80% of the DAQ market compared to a much smaller number in the control world. Allen-Bradley, Seimens are come big corporate names that own a lot of the control market and a cheaper version that I see a lot in embedded type applications is a PC-104 stack (popular in academics).

LabVIEW does support m-scripts with the new m-script node.

m-script support in LabVIEW

You can use NI hardware in Matlab also ... see explanation on the DAQmx toolbox.

DAQmx toolbox

Emanative

Answer 4

You can also use plain ol' Visual Studio to control NI hardware if that's more your thing. Or NumPy for that matter.

Ringmaster