thePsychologist's Journal: DAQ Cards On Linux

A data acquisition (DAQ) card is an interface from a computer to a device that collects some kind of data. Recently at work I was tasked to make an Advantech PCI-1735 PCI card work with a Skinner box for behavioural monitoring.

I chose to try Linux. I did also try the driver on Windows, although it did not install properly.

There's actually quite a bit of information on DAQ cards out there. The first place to go is the Comedi (Linux Control and Measurement Device Interface) website. They have support for 396 different DAQ cards. The only problem is getting it to work.

There is no actual support for the PCI-1735 (PCI-1734 supported!), but I think the drivers should be similar enough to get it to work. Over the next few weeks I'm going to try and set up a fully functional system that reads data from the Skinner box using the PCI-1735 card on Ubuntu linux.

So far I've tried to compile the source, and I actually got it to work, but unfortunately I'm still stuck at getting the drivers to work properly.