Universal Driver is a software toolkit that provides a C language interface capability for Diamond Systems' I/O boards. It is provided free with all of Diamond Systems' hardware products and may also be downloaded free from the Diamond Systems website (http://www.diamondsystems.com/). It supports all the data acquisition features of Diamond Systems products, plus support for the watchdog timers on Diamond Systems CPU boards.
NOTE: The Athena data acquisition circuit is identical to the data acquisition implementation in the Prometheus CPU board. Version 5.8 of the Universal Driver supports the Athena via its support for the Prometheus DAQ. Athena customers should initialize the Universal Driver for the board using the board constant DSC_PROM. DSCUD 5.9 will include direct support for the Athena, so customers using 5.9 or later can initialize the board using the DSC_ATHENA constant instead.
You can download a recent version of this complete documentation for your user offline. It will unzip as a directory of web pages which you can view using your web browser. You will not need internet access to view these pages offline.
Download: DSCUD_Manual.zip (347K)
You can also download an older version of the documentation (http://files.diamondsystems.com/DSCUD/DSCUD_Manual_5.9.zip) in zip format. The zip file contains documentation in html files.
If you would like the driver ported to another platform contact Diamond Systems technical support. We are always evaluating other systems and your input will help us determine which platforms are in demand. You can also license our driver source code and port the driver yourself.
Universal Driver software, and this manual, assume a familiarity with programming, the C language, and the PC hardware platform. It is also assumed that the reader is familiar with the target operating system and related C development tools for your platform like Borland, Visual Studio, or the GCC compiler. You also need to understand the features and capabilities of the boards you are using. You should read the hardware manual for each board in your project to get a more complete understanding of it before attempting to write software for it.
The Universal Driver software package includes example programs to help you understand the use of the driver functions and to use as a starting point for developing your own applications. Additional utility programs are provided for configuring serial port boards, reading out EEPROM data on autocalibrating boards, and demonstrating some boards' operation in Windows. Board functions supported by Universal Driver include the following: Analog input (A/D conversions) Analog output (D/A conversions) Digital I/O Counting, timing, and frequency/period measurement Interrupt-based A/D, D/A, and digital I/O User interrupts Autocalibration Note that Universal Driver does not support any serial port operations. On boards such as EMM-8M-XT that are listed as supported boards, only the digital I/O features are supported. In addition the utilities folder of the release disk contains some board configuration and test programs for the serial port boards.
This manual contains information on the following subjects.
To use Universal Driver, first install it according to the instructions in Chapter 2. The easiest way to get running quickly is to first run some example programs to verify that driver installation is correct and your board is installed and running properly. After that you can start to modify the example programs, and then move on to develop your own applications. In many cases you can cut and paste code from the examples into your own application. The examples have been designed to be generic whenever possible and to include as much explanation as possible, so that they can be easily understood and modified to suite your particular application.
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This page was last modified 21:40, 20 Sep 2005.
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