Hi all,
Not sure if this is in the right subforum, but I thought this is closest to digital I/O since it's mostly hardware related.
I have a piece of equipment in the lab that can send triggers, 5V pulses with adjustable width of 10-1000 ms, and also receive a similar trigger as input. I generally use 100 ms pulses. My challenge is to let my LV software communicate to this machine via these triggers. Simply put: my LV needs a start trigger from the machine, and it should return a trigger when finished.
Of course this was easily built using a USB-6008 or NI-9403 that we have in the lab. Unfortunately, these are not available off-site where this has to work, so I'm looking for a small and cheap piece of hardware to do this task. I figured I could do this with an FTDI TTL232R cable (with the FT232R chip) using bit banging, but that has gotten me quite the headache via LabView (and Python for that matter) by now. I'm sure there must be an easy, cheap way to do this. Interfacing via USB is fine, I also have RS232 and RS485 available if that helps.
Does anyone have a good suggestion for this? Thanks in advance!