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National Instruments Corporation 1-1 AT-MIO-16X User Manual
Chapter
1
IntroductionThis chapter describes the AT-MIO-16X, lists the contents of your
AT-MIO-16X kit, the optional software, and optional equipment, and
explains how to unpack the AT-MIO-16X.
About the AT-MIO-16X
Congratulations on your purchase of the National Instruments
AT-MIO-16X. The AT-MIO-16X is a high-performance,
software-configurable 16-bit DAQ board for laboratory, test and
measurement, and data acquisition and control applications. The
board performs high-accuracy measurements with self-calibration,
high-speed settling to 16 bits, noise as low as 0.8 LSBrms, and a
maximum DNL of ±0.5 LSB. Because of its large FIFOs and
dual-channel DMA, the AT-MIO-16X can achieve high performance,
even when used in environments that may have long interrupt latencies,
such as Windows.
Because off-the-shelf instrumentation amplifiers require 500 µsec and
more to settle to 16-bit accuracy at high gains when sampling multiple
channels, National Instruments developed the NI-PGIA. The NI-PGIA,
which is used on the AT-MIO-16X, is an instrumentation amplifier that
settles to 16 bits in 40 µs, even when the board is used at its highest gain
of 100.
A common problem with DAQ boards is that you cannot easily
synchronize several measurement functions to a common trig ger o r
timing event. The AT-MIO-16X has the Real-Time System Integration
(RTSI) bus to solve this problem. The RTSIbus consists of our custom
RTSI bus interface chip and a ribbon cable to route timing and trigger
signals between several functions on one or more DAQ boards in
your PC.
The AT-MIO-16X can interface to the Signal Conditioning eXtensions
for Instrumentation (SCXI) system so that you can acquire over 3,000
analog signals from thermocouples, RTDs, strain gauges, v oltag e
sources, and current sources. You can also acquire or gene ra te dig ital