NI DAQ on a budget

[NivagSwerdna]

A while back I bought a second hand NI DAQ USB 6008 and a couple of days ago I found a use for it.... I just wanted to record an analog signal at 1k samples per second for a period of 50 seconds...

I downloaded DAQmx and LabView which together was about a 4GB download!   And then a couple of YouTube tutorials later I captured my data all under the 45 days evaluation licence.  Job done.

I can see LabView is amazing but I just don't have those requirements so after 45 days I'm going to be stuck.  (And to be honest I don't really want 4GB of software on my PC)

Is there an easy/cheap way to get data out of my DAQ?

Thanks in advance

[JS]

I guess the visa commands are open, if you know them you can send via telnet or some other programs and get the answer back, Matlab could be a useful tool, you need an instrument com pakage IIRC, I could look for the package name later. Octave has that same functionality but for free.

All that is useful if you are ok with coding, otherwise I don't know an alternative. I've tried with my scope and it was pretty straight forward once pc had everything installed to do so. I guess there must be a way to do it from excel directly as well.

JS

[rstofer]

You'll have to do the research but it appears that you can use MATLAB.  There is a Home license that isn't terribly expensive but it is not free.

[JS]

You'll have to do the research but it appears that you can use MATLAB.  There is a Home license that isn't terribly expensive but it is not free.

Octave is free and has basically the same functionality, while you miss some extra tools from matlab, it does a pretty nice job.

JS

[NivagSwerdna]

I think PyDAQmx might be the way to go.  The driver itself, DAQmx appears to be free.

I do actually have a temporary (six month) license to MatLab as part of an online course I am enrolled in so I might also investigate that... not sure if my student licence covers "NI-DAQmx Support from Data Acquisition Toolbox"

Thanks for the suggestions so far.