thePsychologist's Journal: DAQ Card Works (Sort Of)

It's a Friday, and it's quiet around here in the office except for the occasional chat and typing. I thought I might see if I could get the drivers installed on Windows XP to test the card out. I'm more of high level software guy than a hardware hacker, and I'm really not very interested in hardware and driver programming.

About half an hour later, I get the Windows drivers installed and I can read data from the card using the test utility. So it actually does work. Drivers working/not working is a manufacturer thing, so I don't consider it much of a point towards Windows. However, it would be very nice to have a nice GUI utility on Linux with options like:

• listing all detected interfaces
• reading raw data from any interface (dump of some kind)
• list of associated drivers for the device

Sort of like a graphical frontend to utilities like modprobe and lspci, with the ability to do raw dumps of signals from the devices. I seriously don't know if this last requirement is possible, but it would be nice, if only to verify that everything is plugged in properly.

It would also be nice to have drivers that work with any major kernel version, like installable 2.6.x drivers. I wonder if a modification like this is possible. Maybe some kernel hackers and app developers will read this post as a hint to what a casual Linux user would like.