I have an instrument that uses NI PCI 6733 and PCI 6601 cards that controls a camera, an electronic shutter, current control FET and power supplies. Control and timing was performed by traditional nidaq functions. I have now updated to windows 7 and the latest Labwindows with NIDAQmx. Part of the control involves cascaded timers outputing invidual pulses for control with critical timing in the microsecond range. All of the experimental sequences were implemented with hardware timing using pulses generated by the various traditional daq counter application like FSK, triggerable, retriggerable. Two timers on the PCI 6733 cascaded and produced timing/ control input to the four times on the 6601.
I can no longer implement the timing using the nidaqmx. The same applications are missing and the nidaqmx functions do not seem to be capable of cascading the counters to that one counter can trigger a selectable pulse on another. In fact going through all the examples I do not think that it is possible for one timer pulse to trigger another timer pulse on the 6601. I know there are trigger functions but these apply to the whole task and if you have more than one counter then the trigger is configured for the whole task. The retriggerable pulse example with the external trigger suffers from this problem because it requires a signal to be placed on the external terminal for it to run.
I am wondering why a multiple timer card is sold if cascaded hardware critical timing is not possible. It seems simple but the question boils down to "Can one counter pulse trigger another counter or trigger two counters for that matter?"